The Coonridge Digest: Spring traditions

Greetings from the Ridge.

I keep reading in those "olden days" magazines about the spring tradition of hanging May baskets on neighbor’s doorknobs. I must have had a deprived childhood. For the life of me I can’t remember anything that’s been hung from my doorknob other than a friendly reminder from UPS that if I don’t stay home I can’t get my package.

The Chinese celebrate spring by hanging "Door gods" on each side of their portal, depicting fierce dragons. I guess they don’t like UPS men. London celebrates spring with its annual Chelsea Flower show, Budapest holds its famous music festival, Vienna hosts the years Arts Festival, Copenhagen celebrates with daily parades, Venice races its boats, in Gloucester they roll cheese down the streets, and Bavaria deems the beginning of spring to be just a dandy time to drink a good deal of beer.

New Orleans is pretty much the only U.S. city to continue the spring revelries as the Mardi Gras continues off and on for about a month celebrating fertility. I’ve not been to New Orleans during their annual festival but from what I’ve seen on television, it all seems a bit too fertile for my sensibilities. I mean, fertility is a good thing if kept in check, but when you wade through it in streets my Puritan instincts recoil a bit.

In fact, it was the Puritans who first banned the over-fertilization of spring celebrations, and when they lost their influence in England and crossed the waters to take up residence in the land of the free and home of the prudish, spring merriments had largely become a time for children’s revelry.

Even the name "Easter" is a hybridized version of the Scandinavian "Ostra," later changed to "Eastre," the pagan goddess of spring and renewal. The Roman Emperor Constantine got up from his hammock on one fine spring morning in 325 AD and announced that Easter should begin on the first full moon of spring which begins with the spring equinox on March 21. Parade planners, school administrators, and calendar makers all wish that Connie had stayed in bed that morning since he came up with a formula that practically no one can understand.

In Coonridge we tend to soft pedal the fertility aspect when celebrating the rites of spring. Perhaps it’s due to our aging population. The only fertility we experience firsthand is the frustration of following a truck-pulled anhydrous tank for seven slow miles on a two-lane country road. We call it the White Tank Rumba as we weave back and forth on the road trying to find a place to pass.

Other modern rites of spring in the Midwest include such idyllic activities as the Cellar Sweep. This has no resemblance to Grandma’s yearly ritual of cleaning out the basement to make room for the summer’s bounty of canned preserves. Today most of our "fresh produce" is preserved by Del Monte in a New Jersey cannery. Instead, I refer to the fact that at least once during the spring season our 500 mile swath of "Tornado Alley" will force us to go scrambling down to the basement while the weekly storm cleans the dead trees out of the yard.

Another 21st-century rite of Midwest spring is the Planter Polka. You have ten minutes to get to town before the store closes so you mash the gas pedal to the floor, round the first curve, and come face to bumper with a large, green behemoth known as the modern corn planter.

Eliakim Spooner of Vermont came up with a dandy concept in the spring of 1799 and called it his "automatic corn planter." Eliakim’s little invention could be held by one man and it planted a single row of corn across the Vermont hillside. Today’s planter resembles the state of Tennessee with legs and is approximately the same size. A Rhode Island farmer can plant his entire crop in two passes across the field. When you come up behind one of these modern seed machines, you not only can’t see around it, you might have difficulty finding the sun.

Most of Coonridge celebrates the annual Mystery of the Limbs. You go out into your spring yard and see that it’s covered with sticks, twigs, and limbs of every size and variety. Then you look up into your trees and see the exact same congregation of foliage that you observed all last summer. Where did all this refuse come from? It’s a mystery that we usually blame on our neighbors.

Frankly, I look at Herb every April and wonder where the ancients ever got the idea of spring being a time to celebrate fertility. I usually settle for picking up sticks.

You ever in Coonridge, stop by. We may not answer the door, but you’ll enjoy the trip.