Spring comes every year at the right time. It brings flowers, rainstorms and baseball. I’m sure there is a study about people and the season they love the most. My favorite season is Autumn. It brings colorful leaves, rainstorms and football.
As I’ve gotten older the seasons come around quickly. They bring their own personalities and fragrances and then they roll into the next cycle.
Every year the seasons bring their holidays and their sports. They bring their unique angle from the sun and they make us accommodate their demands.
Spring has brought a warmer breeze that will seem cold come May. Flowers have started to pop up and trees will soon bud. The smell of hotdogs covered with onions will soon fill the caves surrounding the diamonds.
I may be an Autumn guy, but how can I not enjoy what lurks these next several weeks.
I miss one thing about spring, but at the time I dreaded it.
My grandmother had a small house in Broad Ripple. It was a one-story brick two-bedroom home on Indianola Avenue. There were about ten or twelve windows that had storm windows in the winter and screens in the summer. They were made with solid wood frames and each window and screen had a brass tag with a number on it. Each window frame had a matching brass tag to correspond.
Gramma had hooks in the garage to store the screens in the winter and the windows in the summer. Each hook had a number as well and they were in order from the back of the house to the front.
When my mom moved me away from Chicago and into the same neighborhood as my Gramma, this became my biannual chore as well. Gramma gained a new helper that had a deeze and doze accent.
The windows were still heavy in seventh grade, but became light as a feather by senior year. My junior year, I carried two at a time and Loretta Zoellner became unglued.
If my dad caught me doing this he would have said, “Son! You gotta be shitting me!” When my Gramma caught me carrying two out of the garage she gave me her stern, “For Heaven’s Sake Johnny!”
These words coming from a petite elderly lady carried the same weight as those from a mountain of a man.
Now Gramma didn’t just replace screen one with window one and so on and so on. We had to wash each set before we hung them on the house and back in the garage. Not only do they get dirty on the house, but they got dusty in the garage as well.
This small little house in a working-class neighborhood on the northside of Indianapolis seemed like a mansion for two days out of the year.
I’ll tell you what though. I ate a good breakfast, lunch and dinner that day. I didn’t get much money, but I always received something homemade baked fresh just for me. I also was given the wisdom from the smartest woman that I ever met.
Spring still comes and goes and I will never take out another window and replace it with a screen ever again. That’s what I miss more than anything when the rebirth of April and May come along each year.
I don’t do anything as meticulous in my life as my Gramma’s chores, but I do get up every morning and write to you, pray to God and work my ass off because of those windows.
I’m sure the new owner put triple tracks in every window soon after they bought it. I would have!
I can’t wait to go to heaven and help my Gramma put her windows up in autumn and have a piece of zucchini bread or her famous cinnamon breakfast rolls.
I’m going to pack up the typewriter and go watch the sunrise. The lions are roaring and the air is crisp. Thirty-two teams are left and most brackets are in shambles….
… Be kind, be astonished and enjoy the smile on the sun.
And it is National Tamale Day. In Chicago we have two kinds, TomTom and Supreme.
“Utah get me two!”
