Conrad Boyce is the editor and publisher of the Cosmos. He has a BA in English from the University of Alberta and a diploma in journalism from Grant Macewan Community College in Edmonton. He lived and worked in the Yukon and Vancouver Island before arriving in Ontario in 1995. Beyond these pages, he is the Artistic Director of OnStage Uxbridge, and the technical manager of the Uxbridge Music Hall.
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Endless spring
You often hear Canadians say that they consider themselves blessed to live in a country with four distinct seasons.
It’s a rationalization, of course. What are they supposed to say, that they curse their parents for living in Prince Albert or Sturgeon Falls rather than having the foresight to bring them up in Tucson or Bermuda?
But what if you could live your life over and dwell in a land with one eternal season? Which would you choose? Duh, I hear you saying, there are only two choices: winter with variations in a place like Antarctica (although it at least has endless daylight for a few months in a row), or summer with variations in Caracas or Cancun. Who would not choose summer?
Well, OK, I wouldn’t. But I wouldn’t choose winter, either. As long as I’m getting to indulge in a fantasy, I vote for endless spring.
For me, all the other seasons have distinct disadvantages, particularly as I advance in years. Summer is too darn hot and humid. I can’t sleep, even with air conditioning, particularly with air conditioning. You can’t really enjoy the beauties of summer because you’re too darn uncomfortable. A waste of sunshine, summer.
I don’t enjoy winter all that much anymore, either, to tell you the truth. Too white. Too long. Each season, according to my wall calendar, is supposed to be three months long. Well, winter this year arrived well before Dec. 21, and it was still hanging around on the last day of March. Frost on the windshield, for Pete’s sake.
Autumn is called fall because it’s a precipitous and heartbreaking decline from one miserable season into a worse one. In the Yukon, fall lasted a week, one glorious week where all the leaves turned to gold and hurried to the ground so they’d be nice and snug under the first snowfall, which usually arrived about mid-August.
I find that vastly preferable to the Ontario autumn, which just irritates everyone, especially when it’s accompanied by the roar of souped-up tractors from Elgin Park on the first Friday after Labour Day. I keep trying to be out of town that night, returning for the less deafening aspects of the Fall Fair, but it never quite works out. On 363 days a year, we’re glad we live on Reach Street, so that’s not too bad.
So not being overly fond of the other three seasons, I’m left with spring. And forget the brown part of spring, the brown mucky part. I consider that the denouement of winter, the old man’s last rattling gasp.
My spring is the one of robins, crocuses and rushing brooks. And tulips. Back in 1997, the year my wife and I were wed, spring was a tad late. We took our honeymoon in Ottawa, which by early May was supposed to be in the middle of a Tulip Festival.
We were there for four days. We saw one tulip. But it was a very pretty tulip. And of course in Ontario, the grand finale of spring is the profusion of trilliums (or trillia, to use the proper Latin plural). Last year we featured Ontario’s provincial flower on our May 15 cover.
Since it doesn’t get any better than trilliums, I would like my fantasy year to be an eternal recycling of the six and a half weeks between April 1 and May 15.
Maybe it’s just because as I get older, the theme of a continual re-birth is very, very seductive.
Happy spring!
