{"id":73,"date":"2012-03-14T18:44:00","date_gmt":"2012-03-15T00:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/egregioustwaddle\/2012\/03\/nothing-gold-can-stay\/"},"modified":"2016-05-02T11:14:00","modified_gmt":"2016-05-02T17:14:00","slug":"nothing-gold-can-stay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/egregioustwaddle\/2012\/03\/nothing-gold-can-stay.html","title":{"rendered":"Nothing Gold Can Stay"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
\"\"<\/a><\/div>\n

It\u2019s 75 degrees and the sun is shining. In Ohio. In March! This morning, I walked out the door to be greeted by the impudent brassy trumpeting of the first lone daffodil, ruffling out from a bulb that hasn\u2019t bloomed in years.<\/p>\n

On a day like this, in spite of rich fodder\u2013somebody wants the UN to order a ban on Dante<\/a><\/u>, because the Commedia is politically incorrect; canonists and comboxers continue to parse who gets Communion<\/a><\/u>; the US bishops have released a new statement on religious freedom<\/a><\/u>\u2013I just can\u2019t Go There. It\u2019s spring, and I can\u2019t waste a minute of it on anything less than this ordinary and tremendous miracle.<\/p>\n

My rapture over spring comes from having lived two-thirds of my life without it, or at least without the accoutrements of a classic literary spring\u2013the hosts of golden daffodils, the lilacs last in the dooryard blooming, the crying of the frogs that someone better get between me and. Oh, it\u2019s not that Southern California doesn\u2019t have seasons. We just didn\u2019t have the same ones the poets had. The old joke is that L.A.\u2019s four seasons are Fire (autumn, when the Santa Anas whip tossed cigarette butts into infernos), Earthquake (winter, when Southern Cal\u2019s most devastating tremors strike, in spite of transplanted Midwesterners\u2019 superstition that \u201cearthquake weather\u201d is hot, humid, and still; that\u2019s actually tornado weather), Flood (when spring showers scrape whole hillsides full of multimillion-dollar homes down to the sea), and Riot (summer, when it\u2019s just too hot and smoggy and crowded not to hurt somebody).<\/p>\n

In truth, I remember Southern California seasons as olfactory. Spring is petrichor<\/i>\u2013the actual scientific name (yes, there is one!) for the distinctive, ozone-y smell of rain when it volatilizes the plant oils impacted in hard earth or concrete. Summer is dusty sage, baking in the golden foothills that look like sleeping lions. Autumn is the licorice smell of eucalyptus on the wind, turning the whole population into drugged and grinning koalas. And winter is the incense of Douglas firs, trucked down from the Cascades and heaped up in every corner Christmas tree lot. Wonderful, evocative seasonal scents, all of them, but Vivaldi never composed for them.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t see my first real temperate-climate spring until I visited Britain in 1995. Suddenly, I \u201cgot\u201d daffodils. They were everywhere\u2013poking up from between broken gravestones in the village churchyard in Arundel, ranked in stiff golden rows in London\u2019s parks, doing improbable vertical thrusts off the sheer black volcanic face of Edinburgh\u2019s Castle Rock.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/div>\n

I moved to Dayton in 1996, and every year since I have been stalking spring. No matter how closely I watch, it happens overnight and suddenly and out of the corner of my eye, like all great magic tricks. The bulbs that yielded only whisker-thin greenery one year blare daffodil trumpets and brimming tulip chalices the next. Forsythia goes from an armful of sticks to Hello, yellow!<\/i> while my head is turned, and lilac goes from stick to purple intoxication with the same swiftness a month later. Witch hazels erupt in puffballs of pale chartreuse sweetness. Star magnolias (which, having grown up with saucer magnolias, I refused for three years to believe were actually magnolias at all; I took to calling them Wet Kleenex Trees) wave fringed white flags. Redbuds and dogwood and hyacinths and all that other stunning abundance, it\u2019s all here without warning, arranged by e.e. cummings\u2019s \u201cperhaps hand (which comes carefully out of Nowhere . . . .\u201d<\/p>\n

And then, just like that, it\u2019s gone.<\/p>\n

The terrible elusiveness of spring, for me, makes it a much more fitting symbol of the Fall than fall is. Of course the northern hemisphere\u2019s transition from the dead of winter to the life of spring makes it a natural for Easter cards and decorations. But I always remember that the landscape of Palestine had far more in common with the Mediterranean desert climate that was Southern California\u2019s natural state before the theft of water made it an unnatural paradise (see Polanski\u2019s Chinatown<\/i>, as good a proof text on the seven deadly sins as any you might peruse this Lent, for the backstory on that). The Resurrection, for me, will always be best illustrated by the high desert\u2019s explosion into wildflower bloom after a March gullywasher. Spring here in these parts, on the other hand, literary spring,\u00a0is always about what we had, and lost.<\/p>\n

To wit, two poems, my two favorites about spring excluding cummings\u2019s, which I can\u2019t reproduce for copyright reasons. One\u2019s from a lapsed Swedenborgian who imbibed rock-ribbed Congregationalism from the New England soil, the other from an English Jesuit. As different as they are, both saw in spring what I do\u2013the joy of that first garden, the sorrow of its loss.<\/p>\n

Robert Frost wrote:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/div>\n

Nature\u2019s first green is gold,
\nHer hardest hue to hold.
\nHer early leaf\u2019s a flower;
\nBut only so an hour.
\nThen leaf subsides to leaf.
\nSo Eden sank to grief.
\nSo dawn goes down to day,
\nNothing gold can stay.<\/p>\n

And Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
Nothing is so beautiful as Spring \u2013 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0 When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0 Thrush\u2019s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;<\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0 The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0 The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
What is all this juice and all this joy?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0 A strain of the earth\u2019s sweet being in the beginning<\/span><\/div>\n
In Eden garden. \u2013 Have, get, before it cloy,\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0 Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0 \u00a0Most, O maid\u2019s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
If it\u2019s spring where you are, be quick. Drop the politics and the canons and the chores. Get out in it, grab all the juice and joy you can\u2013have, get, before it cloy, before it cloud. Nothing gold can stay.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Images are the author\u2019s own.<\/em><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s 75 degrees and the sun is shining. In Ohio. In March! This morning, I walked out the door to be greeted by the impudent brassy trumpeting of the first lone daffodil, ruffling out from a bulb that hasn\u2019t bloomed in years. On a day like this, in spite of rich fodder\u2013somebody wants the UN […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1086,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nNothing Gold Can Stay<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"It's 75 degrees and the sun is shining. In Ohio. In March! 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