Friday, April 05, 2002

Spring Festivals

After a morning spent shuffling papers, last Saturday, I popped into the conservatory in Potawatomi park on my way home. For just a dollar, the turnstile tumbles you into a fragrant and gaudy display of Spring bulbs, flowering among the tropical plants. Pots of yellow tulips march past the palms, and the scent of pansies mingles with the heady perfume of citrus blossoms.

Ready for Easter, the place was full of tall, white lilies. Instead of winsome pre-Raphaelite damosels, however, the place was teeming with husky Hoosiers in low-rise jeans and regrettable pastels. Cameras clicked and bored children posed among the flowers.

Through the glass, you could see snow on the ground still outside. I pottered along the paths between the flowerbeds and sniffed, tentatively, at the blooms. Some of the specimens are spectacularly infested with various pests, and I was wary of snorting a colony of aphids. It’s a delightful place, especially when Spring keeps postponing her arrival in Michiana.

Still, I know the season is changing by my neighbours’ latest flags and the plastic eggs dangling from their shrubs. The fibreglass goose up the street has a new fluffy outfit and bunny-ears for Easter. It’s a funny thing, this American assiduity in marking all the festivals the calendar has to offer. Barely have the shelves of the local drugstore been cleared of their Hallowe’en merchandise, when they are stacked with Thanksgiving paraphernalia. Christmas knickknacks are swept away by a tidal wave of Valentine’s Day pink in early January, then St Paddy’s emerald surges through in late February. Yet Americans hardly grant themselves any vacation time off, at least, not by European standards. Perhaps we should declare a new national holiday devoted to the blessed St Hallmark, patron saint of the seasonal goods aisle.

I’ve always liked Easter, with its cheerfully pagan symbolism of egg hunts and pussy-willow switches. When I lived in Montreal, my German-Jewish Polish-Catholic Canadian friends had an annual egg-painting event, to which all their friends and family were invited. We would sit around the kitchen table, holding special wax-pens over a candle-flame, then draw patterns in molten beeswax on white hens’ eggs. Whatever is masked in wax resists the dye, and, by a series of maskings and immersion in colored dyes, complex designs can be achieved. After the final immersion in the deepest dye, the eggs are warmed gently and the smoke-darkened beeswax is wiped off, revealing the sudden brilliance of the painted eggs.

Such shared rituals are important as they break up the year’s labours, setting some time apart from the everyday and connecting us with recurrent cycles.

There’s a flattening of the sense of time in non-agricultural work. There’s little in the nature of paper pushing itself that invites marking. A festival of the biannual inventory of the office supplies cupboard is less compelling than harvest home or the first planting of the season. I suppose we could mark the turning of the fiscal year with a ceremony in which old files are shredded and taken to the recycling bin. Or perhaps solemnly clad middle management might preside over the gathering in of the annual reports.

Everyday life in the post-industrial world is less and less attached to natural cycles. We eat fruits out of season and wear whatever we please pretty much year round. Office workers scurry from their centrally-heated homes to climate-controlled cars and then offices, where the fluorescent lights never set. Perhaps our mass fascination with the weather channel, the latest Doppler reports, speaks of some yearning for a life where weather affects more than the traction of our tyres on the highway.

Meanwhile, under the glass dome of the Potawatomi conservatory, the hyacinths are holding up bravely. Go slip your dollar offering in the turnstile and participate in a fragrant seasonal festival to welcome Spring.

Broadcast by Louise Collins on April 05, 2002
Customs & Rituals • Home & Garden • Nature & Outdoors • Permalink • Printer Friendly
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