Springtime – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane
I’m so glad to have enjoyed this April, to have had some truly beautiful days in short sleeves out under the blue skies listening to the birdsong that rings around my neighborhood. Throughout my life one of the most commonly asked questions has been “what’s your favorite season?” For the longest time I’d say Winter for the mystery of those long, dark, cold nights, for the appearance of the constellations like Orion that I remembered seeing the most in my childhood, and for the exuberant joy of Christmas and New Year’s. Yet today, I don’t think I have a favorite anymore. There are things I like about all four seasons, from the radiant red leaves of Fall to the warm days and nights of Summer. Spring is perhaps the most beautiful of the four seasons for how much joy it radiates. Spring sees the rebirth of the gardens and trees here in Kansas City, it sees our wild neighbors––the birds and beasts alike––returning from their wintering to a new year of life here in the Fountain City.
I find myself drawn to less dramatic things today, less of the big lightning storms that race across the prairies in Summer, and more to the softer, gentler, more subtle breezes of Spring. Sure, it does rain a lot here in the Springtime, as the winter snows begin to warm up and turn to rain. Spring is a time when we have the rains we need throughout the Summer, the water that keeps life possible here on the edge of the Great Plains, in a region dry enough that really it shouldn’t support a city of 2 million.
Yesterday, after finishing writing my lecture notes for my upcoming Summer class titled The Columbian Exchange in the First Age of Exploration, 1500–1700, I took a break from my desk and went outside into our backyard to get a better listen to the birds that were singing their hearts out on our back fence and in our fountain. There’s one blackbird who spent most of the weekend playing in the bubbling water that burst from the trunk of that elephant-shaped fountain. If a bird could laugh, then that little blackbird was giggling with joy the whole time.
My fascination with Spring began seven years ago in April 2016 when after a long winter I found myself vacationing in France with my parents. We spent our first week together staying in a guest house on the shores of Lake Annecy in the French Alps, the clearest glacial lake I’ve ever seen, enjoying the stillness of the place and the immense natural wonder that the lake, the forests, and surrounding mountains held. Then, as that week came to an end, we boarded a train in Geneva and headed northwest to Paris, savoring a week together there in the French capital before I returned to London, where I was then living, and my parents home to Kansas City. I remember a great deal about that week in Paris, in fact I wrote an entire chapter in my book Travels in Time Across Europe all about that week.
Yet what I remember most about that city is the light, the brilliant delicacy of the April sunshine in Paris will always stay with me. It made the impressionist paintings that I grew up loving, the works of Monet, make more sense to me having been there in that moment. I remember one day in particular when we traveled out to Meudon to visit Renoir’s home and studio where the grand boulevards of the city give way to a mix of suburbia and creeping remnants of the countryside. I learned to appreciate Renoir’s sculptures far better that day, and to understand more of what makes Spring such a beautiful season in our lives. Vivaldi captured that emotion in his Four Seasons, Johann Strauss Jr. evoked the joy of the Flowers of Spring in his Frühlingsstimmen Walzerand Ella Fitzgerald embodied it in her own famous song April in Paris. I for one will let that little blackbird have the last word.
To hear the blackbird, click on the podcast player at the top.
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 