Hey, hey, it’s spring. How can I tell? I look for color. Color, whoo hoo, where are you. Oh, right here in my backyard, in the form of these cute little pansies. These were a gift from my mother-in-law when she came to visit a couple of weeks ago. She is the pansy lady. She gave a set of pansies to each of my children. We had an interesting time trying to “cooperate” to put these in a couple of pots. Each child has his or her own idea of what “helping” means. Often it seems to entail telling me what to do. All three of them at once. That’s what I get for being a bossy mom in the first place.
Then there’s this teensy little delicate flower of a bird’s egg I discovered this morning in the driveway. It made me wonder if all the little birdies all around the city are hatching at once. One of my favorite things about spring is hearing the birds again, early in the morning, waking up with an earlier dawn, flitting around outside. The pair of birds that has been nesting in the eaves of our front porch roof has returned.
Lastly, and best of all, the sign of spring I anticipate so excitedly, with joyous rapture: the appearance of good-humored Springfield DPW workers, blessing us like angels, arriving to fill the treacherous, gaping wounds in the pavement left from old man winter. I watched them fill these several holes with surprisingly mixed feelings of elation and grief. On the one hand, these holes will spare many of us the damaging effects of driving over multiple, deep potholes. I will no longer have to put up with the eyesore, or the short-term solution of filling the holes with large gravel, which then spill out of the holes and everywhere into the street, causing more trouble than it’s worth. Visitors will no longer complain to me, as though I am the mayor of the asphalt road in front of my house, that these holes should be filled. On the other hand, speeding is a big problem in my neighborhood, and I have to say that although the potholes are a real pain, they were very effective at slowing traffic. And for those drivers who did not slow down, there was always an amusing, slightly disturbed satisfaction at watching what happened to their cars as they tried to reach warp drive and somehow skim the surface of reality by not really dipping into the hole with their tires by reaching such high speeds.
Anyway, what’s done is done, and I think overall, it’s probably better to fill the holes and deal with the speeding issue separately, than try to make the argument that a proper anti-speeding initiative is actually going to be the fostering and maintenance of treacherous potholes. I can only imagine what my household would be like if I adopted that kind of approach to cleanliness and order, as a parent, in order to come through a back door of rule enforcement. “You won’t obey the rules, eh? Then here, take this! We won’t bother to keep it up for ya, either! How d’ya like that?” No, something tells me that wouldn’t go over very well, and if I were the mayor of the asphalt in front of my house, I would hear a lot of grumbling from my constituents, and worse behavior would ensue.
But wait, is that what’s already happened in Springfield?