'Give Thanks, Give Thanks'

Already people are complaining about spring’s tardiness. This is Houston, where a week or two of cold, even a few brief dips below freezing, are likened to Shackleton in Antarctica. The garden has wilted, shifted from green to brown in weeks. Look at the bright side: you don’t have to mow the lawn. For the moment, no mosquitoes. In the North, February was one of my favorite months. 

Someone asked if I missed Northern winters, and I do, though winter at those latitudes is not one thing. Some years it means snow and cold and little else. Other years it’s a cycle of freezes and thaws, beginning in October or November and ending for good in May with the big thaw of summer, the season that seems like an anomaly, a mere interruption of winter. The best part is the thaw that arrives late in January or early in February, boosting the temperature into the forties or higher. It’s a thaw you can smell, especially in the woods. I think of it as slow-motion decomposition. The earth in patches is bare again and the mineral scent of rot – death turning into life – fills the woods. Skunk cabbage melts snow cover and sends up twisted purple buds, a false harbinger of true spring. It’s a tease, of course. A deep freeze soon follows, sometimes lasting into April.

 

See Aaron Poochigian’s “The Renaissance,” a paean to spring. He doesn’t say so but he’s writing of spring in New York City. An urban spring without skunk cabbage. Here is the final stanza, composed with Poochigian’s customary gusto:

 

“For here and now, this vernal

victory over the squally

season of melancholy

indulgence, for the diurnal

human madrigal

and hibiscus on terraced banks,

for the boon of ‘I’ at all,

give thanks, give thanks.”

 

Poochigian’s epigraph to the poem is from Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”: “In the prison of his days / Teach the free man how to praise.”