Just in time, just in time a crocus poking its rich green throat through the ground.
When I was wondering more and more why the teenage boys in our town look like Civil War survivors with their makeshift hair bands, worn Apache style, and their tattered and battered field jackets from the Army surplus store, a crocus reminded me it was spring.
Will the girls survive the emotional adjustment of being the only ones in junior high without a full-length fake leather maxi coat with brass buttons?
Will white shirts return to their old pristine place in the order of the universe or will all the young men be wearing orange and flaming magenta along with their muttonchops forever and ever?
I really don't care right now, because the crocuses are here and spring is nigh!
Just in time, just in time the forsythia boasted large fat buds and the pussy willows yielded proud pink.
When the mail threatened not to come and I knew I wouldn't be getting that notice telling me how to buy land in Florida, how to win a dream house, how to subscribe to 87 magazines for the rest of my life, how to send away for the full stereophonic tapes of the 1929 Crash, I yielded to self pity.
When I knew I wouldn't be receiving the nice letter from the department store saying "Just a friendly reminder," and the nice letter from the PTA saying "Once more another reminder," and the nice letter from the dentist saying "We would like to remind you," I grew rather fretful thinking how dull it would be, not to be reminded.
But the forsythia boasted and grew proud, and I knew it had to be spring.
When I lost the last brass button from my winter coat, and when they told me all the hems had to go down again, and I had cut three inches off my only raincoat, and when I ran over the umbrella in the driveway, I stopped to cry, but I remembered it was spring!
Just in time, just in time the squirrels returned to play and mockingbirds, plump and frolicsome, waited on the kitchen window-sill for breakfast crumbs.
When the Baron gave up smoking, despite Tony Curtis, and took up knuckle cracking, show swinging, pacing, key-twirling, head-scratching, tuneless whistling, and other interesting habits, I stopped chewing my own fingernails because it had to be spring!
Whew, just in time too!
What do you grow in ashtrays that never get used? Well, you grow popsicle sticks and paper clips and bits of thread and tangerine seeds, but mostly popsicle sticks.
Just in time, just in time the morning air took on the light zephyr sweetness, that soft movement in the flowering shrubs, that faint kiss of coolness, I knew it had to be spring.
When bread prices went up and milk prices went up, and when casseroles became a word to do battle over, and every time I looked at a hamburger it squawked "price index" at me, I considered becoming a vegetarian but I knew I was too weak.
When number one son stopped eating four snacks before dinner and started spending all his time on the telephone talking to one girl and when he told us for the seventh time that week that we never did understand him, I wanted to go on strike too.
And when I came home with a smashing new dress with kick-pleats and all the zippety-do-da and when the Baron aid, "Good grief, you look like an aging flapper," I wanted to run and join the Peace Corps too of fly off to have my face lifted in South America with the household money, but I survived.
Largely, I suppose, because spring had come.
And when the Baron left joyfully for the horizon, golf clubs swung over his shoulder, and son left for the land of big romances, his guitar slung over his shoulder, and the girls left for the department store, their hair flying in the breeze, I sat on the back steps, my face in the sun, feeling, smelling, seeing spring. And it was good!
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