Where is the Warmth?

You’re grateful for any sun-up. Look at the beauty of this little stand of buildings facing on an alley I looked down at from a hotel room once.Mornings are the best!Even when it’s so cold out the birds' whistles and peeps sound as wheezy as kazoo music. Even when it’s so cold the leaves of the long-suffering rhododendrons are needle-thin, shrunk down, as I imagine, to reduce the surface area exposed to these frigid winds.Because there are winds all right, and my God are they frigid.Most years by the end of February, even here in the provinces north of Boston, fat-hipped geese have begun waddling around like they own the place. Crocuses have begun poking their small praying hands up through the soil, even if the soil still rests under a mantle of snow -- though these last weeks you wouldn’t call it snow even; it’s rock-solid ice, with the last day’s snow-dusting it over it.Nature sprinkles a little snow every 48 hours the way county folks once scattered corn meal on dance floors: so you could glide more. Last night I ‘glided’ under a parked car while trying to billygoat may way onto the open road and nearly snapped tibia and fibula both, like a couple of chicken bones.Where is spring? Where oh where are even the signs of spring? We can’t  glimpse it even on the far horizon. It’s 8:15 already two hours after sun-up. I need to work on next week’s column, vacuum four rooms, quickly change the batteries in the two smoke detectors that I can’t actually reach, then go out and buy groceries, a decent bedspread and six pillowcases, all before I see the bodywork Pilates wizard who is helping me strengthen my messed-up back. And all before noon when a whole other list of tasks loom.I love to see that lady wizard. And what’s more fun than buying bed linens?  But with temps like these I'd like it better if I could do all the outdoors stuff WITHOUT ACTUALLY LEAVING THE HOUSE.  

All Cats are Grey in the Dark (and Other Sayings)

All through childhood I heard these little aphorisms from the grownups. I don’t mean the kind still shiny with steel-bladed wit such as you see in Poor Richard’s Almanac, all penned by Ben Franklin in his idler days at the print shop before nation-building and the delicious women of Paris captured all his interest.“Fish and visitors smell in three days.” That’s one of his, about the burden of harboring house guests.  “Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.” That’s another  with its suggestion to  steer clear of companions ‘with a past’ as they used to say. Poor Richard is also the one who said “All cats are gray in the dark,” his tart little observation about sexual act,  which, it seems to be suggesting, is never as much about your partner's relative beauty as it is about you and your own gratification.Anyway, these quips aren’t the kind I’m thinking of here. I’m thinking of the high-minded “thought gems” people once so cherished, the kind schoolgirls once embroidered onto samplers. Everyone born in the first two-thirds of the last century had these maxims spooned into them like cod liver oil."Hitch your wagon to a star. Hang on tight and there you are!” That was one, by sweet old Ralph Waldo Emerson. Then there's Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's oft-quoted “Lives of great men all remind us we should make our lives sublime,  and, departing, leave behind us footprints on the sands of time. But the one  I’m thinking of today, anonymous as far as I know?"As a rule man’s a fool, when it’s hot he wants it cool. When it’s cool he wants it hot, always wanting what is not."I think of it because just yesterday in this space I was saying, Hey where’s winter?” And  also, “What about snow and skiing and those bracing mornings when you see the arms of the rhododendron branches clasped tight to their sides so they look like so many Irish step dancers? Where is all THAT in this balmy post-autumn spring we’ve been having here in Grovers Corners? I wrote this just yesterday. Yesterday!  And today the temperature outside my window?8 degrees and look at the rhodies today!As a rule I’m a fool is my personal aphorism. I have occasion to cite it every single day.