Spring as a Spectator Sport: Some Notes From the Stands

From playground laughter to the quiet joy of an evening walk, springtime holds magic for every generation.

Spring may affect people differently depending on their age, but it always has something to offer. Biba Kayewich

The poets often divide our lifetimes into seasons. That 14-year-old living next door who’s always hammering the driveway with a basketball is in the springtime of youth, while the retiree across the street who spends her mornings gardening is in her autumn years.

The terms “summer years” and “winter years” are used less frequently to reference the human lifespan. Most commentators consider the early 20s to the mid-60s as the summertime of life. Meanwhile, those aged 80 and older are in wintertime, which is described by one online writer as those “years of true wisdom when we know what truly matters and have let go of the rest.” It’s a sweet sentiment intended to encourage the rest of us—although, given what some elderly friends have told me, what “truly matters” to many wintertime people is the location of the nearest restroom when away from home.

Whatever our age, nature’s four seasons belong to all of us, and we belong to the seasons—and, right now, spring has arrived. The hay-fever-and-pollen crew may beg to differ, but for the rest of us, spring’s a riotous celebration of sunshine, green grass, daffodils and forsythia in bloom, and renewal. It’s a party to which we’re all invited and where half the fun, as is true of so many parties, comes from watching others hoist their glasses and dance to the music.

Spring may affect people differently depending on their age, but it always has something to offer. Biba Kayewich

Young Bloods

It was a recent Sunday afternoon in the college library near my town. This school sets a dress code for classes and mass attendance, but otherwise, those regulations take a hike. All around me were young people—kids in the eyes of this late-autumn guy—and nearly all of them were decked out in shorts and T-shirts, clearly relishing the first real warm weather of this tag-end day of March. Some were bent intently over books and laptops, but others had collected together in pairs or groups, whispering and laughing discreetly.

Some were flirting, which brought Tennyson to mind: “In the Spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.”

One such young man, clad in shorts and a hoodie, arrived bearing two large, frosty drinks that looked to be milkshakes or lattes and proudly slipped one onto the table where a girl was tapping away on her laptop. Startled, she jumped a little, then beamed a smile at him that would have melted a glacier. At another table, five female students surrounded a single male, who was clearly relishing his role as entertainer.

The kids were having a grand time, and as a spectator, so was I. As Shakespeare wrote in Sonnet 98, “When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim, /Hath put a spirit of youth in everything”—including me. Yet these students weren’t just poetic metaphors of the season; they were springtime incarnate, fresh and sweet as the wind from the west, bursting with hormones and energy, their clothing and their loose-limbed demeanor vivid markers that wintertime was past.

Summertime Tackles Spring

My next-door neighbors are in the summertime of life, a couple in their later 30s with a teenage daughter and a 12-year-old boy. For them, spring this year has been a time for cleaning up the property and cleaning out the house. Recently, for instance, a trio of machines, one of them a wood chipper, rattled all day around on the far perimeter of their yard, ripping out the strip of fallen and dead trees along an adjacent gravel road, creating a space that glowed in the dusk like a park floored with splinters.

Watching summertime people in springtime is great fun, as I myself once belonged to this industrious crew. This is the time when old clothing, broken toys, and worn furniture are given the heave-ho and taken to a thrift store or one of springtime’s ubiquitous yard sales. This is the time when windows are washed, garden plots are worked and seeded, and a cacophony of lawnmowers fills the drowsy weekend air.

Yet it’s also that grand season for the summer gang when moms and dads take the little ones to the park and visit with friends while the kids play on the swings and slides, a time for those quiet, satisfying evenings when friends enjoy the setting sun and a bottle of wine while they dream aloud of plans for the summer.

The Show That Always Delights

For many autumn and winter people, the rime and cold winds of the Jack Frost months—which they shrugged off or even enjoyed when younger—frequently become iron bars imprisoning them indoors. Once spring appears, however, those penitentiary walls evaporate, and they emerge blinking into the freedom of sunlight and the greening earth.

For those older folks in good health, spring means getting out on the golf course or the tennis court or taking long, leisurely walks in the twilight hour. Even to the infirm, spring brings the sights, sounds, and perfumes of the season: the odors of turned earth, mown grass, and flowers; the early morning choirs of birdsong; and the afternoon shouts and laughter of children in nearby yards or sidewalks.

Gone are some of the burdens and worries of the summertime years. As we leave the fast lane and our world slows a bit, we have the opportunity to take in and enjoy the passing sights.

And here, right here among this older crew, springtime reveals one of its great miracles. We who belong to this autumn company have witnessed the annual arrival of this rebirth and resurrection for 60 to 70 years. Repetition is a key ingredient in boredom, yet every year, we greet and appreciate this same unlocking of the earth and consequently of our hearts as something unique, a gift utterly new to us. It’s like receiving the same birthday present year after year, a familiar gift that unwraps itself with each passing day but, nevertheless, always inspires delight and awe.

Make This Time Your Time

In “Loveliest of Trees,” A.E. Housman gave this heads-up on pausing to admire springtime:

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough, And stands about the woodland ride Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten, Twenty will not come again, And take from seventy springs a score, It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom Fifty springs are little room, About the woodlands I will go To see the cherry hung with snow. Whether we’re 20, like the poem’s narrator, or past our threescore years and 10, right now is the time to become a spectator and look with gratitude on things—and people—in bloom.