Spring Can Really Hang You Up

Spring this year has got me feeling
like a horse that never left the post.
I lie in my room
staring up at the ceiling.
Spring can really hang you up the most.

This is just a piece of a popular song written in 1955, recorded by many artists, but most notably by the great jazz vocalist Betty Carter. If you haven’t heard her version, I urge you to go find it. Give yourself a moment on a gray, cloud-covered morning. No shortage of them lately.

About this time each year, this lyric springs to my mind randomly throughout the work week. Ever since I moved to the rolling hills of Washington county, the weather has increasingly been a factor in my mood. The change of the seasons, more pronounced than in my previous home of Southern California, where the afternoon temperatures vary from 60 to 90 degrees for most of the year, and the sunshine—just as relentless in February as in June—have a real effect on my emotional well-being. However, not in the way one would think.

Most people I meet around these parts, when they find out where we moved from, say things like this: “How do you like these winters? That must be a big change for you guys?” “You tired of these winters yet? Oh, don’t worry, you will be soon! Ha!”

The truth is something I can’t explain. The sub-zero temperatures. Months blanketed with snow. The bundling up in layers. Rushing inside to sit by the fire. It’s all a welcome shock to my system. Like a cold plunge before a dip in a hot spring. It gets the blood flowing. As I lay on my back in pain staring up at the sky after slipping on a patch of black ice, I feel alive.

The opposite side of the year does just the same. Sure, I could live without the buzzing swarms of insects in the steam bath that is the month of August. But it reminds me of my childhood summers on Long Island, trying to sleep at night, glazed in sweat, with nothing but a window fan to bring some relief from the heat. Again, the extremes are invigorating.

And what is to be said about autumn in New York? Such an objectively beautiful sight to behold! Such a colorful, melancholic magic! They’ve written songs about it. There really isn’t a better place to experience the fall than “upstate.” And in late September when I drive down our dirt road, a gauntlet of various shades of orange, red, and gold leaves all waiting to descend upon the earth, I am reminded of how grateful I am we were able to give my eight-year-old daughter this new life in Washington County. Wherever she ends up in life, she’ll be comparing the seasons to these autumns of her youth.

I don’t mean to get sentimental.

The problem, my dear reader, is that spring has sprung. And I don’t mean to complain. But the budding feeling of romance with my wife, whom I’ve now been with for twenty years, is a distant memory. When the crocuses pop their heads out through the leftover leaves, love is not in the air. They’re just a reminder that I have to rake out the beds. And the only relief I’ve found lately is that we might be past the freezing and thawing stage of the early part of spring where our dirt road becomes a treacherous test of my driving skills and my truck’s suspension. Now it will just be a sloppy pile of mud. Mud that will cover our cars, our shoes, and pants for months. There will be no point in washing any of it off, because it’ll all just return tomorrow.

And then there’s the rain. Yeah, yeah, without it the soil can’t produce for the summer farm stands, and the radiant flowers that adorn the village yards, that make Greenwich a picturesque, small-town idyllic scene out of Better Homes and Gardens. To this I say, bah! The birds chirping again, the incessant wood-pecking of the morning woodpeckers, the croaking from the pond, the world coming back, vibrantly springing to life… Meh, I’d trade it all for some consistent sun or even some snow, anything to at least be able to predict if I need to wear a jacket or not.

All alone, the party is over.
Old man winter was a gracious host.
But when you keep praying
for snow to hide the clover,
spring can really hang you up the most.

I was a very sensitive kid. That sensitivity runs in my family, along with a low-grade chronic depression. I remember when I moved to Los Angeles, phone calls back home to my mother on Long Island this time of year, when I would banally ask how she was doing and she would lament like the poet Keats about the grayness of spring. The monsoons of May. The gloom of early June! The trick, she would say, in combatting the rainy-day blues, was to keep busy. When she couldn’t toil out in the garden, mow the lawn, obsessively clean the house, she would read. My mother always had a stack of novels from the library on her nightstand that kept her in good spirits through to summer when she could read on the beach.

This is why, as my wife and I approach our fifth year of operating our barn bookstore, Owl Pen Books, I am taking the weight of the season in stride. The muddy shoes, the mosquitos, and the re-emergence of the ticks. The melancholic discordance between the returning color in the surrounding woods and the lifeless gray clouds above. It can really hang you up. But each year, the stress of opening the business for another season is a welcome distraction. The road signs need to be repainted and reposted. The barns need to be vacuumed, rugs shaken out, books and records cleaned, the shelves dusted, the new inventory priced and shelved, the back stock reorganized yet again. Yes, the flower beds need to be raked, the fallen branches picked up. The toilet in the Chalet de Necessité needs to be serviced.

Then there’s all the promotion. The new promo postcards need to be designed and printed; the new store merchandise needs to be ordered. (This year we have two new tote bags for sale!) All store events need to be scheduled and coordinated with outside groups and vendors. Then the online store needs to be updated with all the new inventory. And lastly, the new preposterously longwinded newsletter must be written.

I am grateful for all this work. There’s no time to wallow about. People will soon be driving up onto our property, complaining about the weather and the pot holes in our dirt road, looking for something to read that isn’t on a screen, something to fill out that stack on the nightstand, something that gives them a better season, a better reason for staying home, something that keeps them out of the rain. Come on up to the Owl Pen, starting April 25th we’re open for the season Wednesday through Sunday, 11am to 5pm, rain or shine.