SEASONS
By William J. Schafer
 

I grew up squarely in the middle of the twentieth century, years which seem now to have receded distantly in both time and space.  As if there were a literal "event horizon" over which past decades sail, like a fleet of little moon-shaped galleons at the edge of the world in a Breughel painting.

Everything in those days, as the Preacher saith, had its time and season, known to all by some social osmosis.  The children's world had its round of rituals-kites, yoyos, squirt guns, etc.-and the world of sports (as today, generally) rolled on an immutable axis of baseball, football, basketball.  Everything in its decreed time, dulce et decorum.

This was because the world was vividly with us-summer sultriness, winter chill, vagaries of spring and autumn.  We felt the seasons, suffered them with our senses and bodies, without much power to "condition" ourselves (as in "Ice Cold Air Conditioning," advertised as a movie-house novelty).

The wheel of seasons demanded rituals of appropriate work:  screens cleaned, patched and up in spring, the reverse process in late autumn, when the heavy, cumbersome storm windows went up.  Other maintenance beckoned-beat small throw rugs, haul out and dust the Myers & Robbins oscillating electric fans, small masterpieces of art nouveau electrolier styling.  Hang the wooden-slatted sunshade on the front porch and be sure its halyard operates flawlessly.

And in late spring the furnace-cleaning crew arrived:  grubby men in sooty monkey suits dragged flexible tubes into houses and yoked them to a large, dirty puddle of canvas in the street.  Mighty blowers on their truck howled, and the canvas inflated into a huge, taut blimp-like sausage that quivered and shuddered as the winter's dross was sucked from the heating system.

The banshee yowl of the giant vacuum was deafening, and legend had it that sometimes the 40-foot bag became over-wrought and exploded, killing the crew and any hapless bystanders.  I gave the mysterious bags a wide berth but gazed in fascinated horror from a half-block away.

The seasons seemed reliable, stable.  Lilacs bloomed at Easter.  I first mowed our lawn on Memorial Day (old people called it Decoration Day).  You needed a windbreaker after Labor Day.  Winters were decoratively snowy.  Summers in the Midwest were unrelievedly humid and sizzling.  Thunderstorms came and went with entertaining pyrotechnics, but no neighborhoods blew away.

In addition to rituals of work and play, there were prescribed gustatory and trivial pursuits.  The ice cream man (usually a high school kid) trudged past daily, pushing a white flat-iron-shaped cart with lyrical Papageno bells and dry ice that blew out clouds of surprising cold when he opened a hatch.  You bought a Popsicle, fudgesicle, Eskimo Pie, skyrocket push-up, ice cream cup or other hard-frozen delectable. Families drove to the A & W root beer stand at night-to tip frosted mugs of head-ache-inducing super-sweetness in the moth-spangled dark.  In fall or winter, you stopped at a soda shop or a hamburger place that grilled "sliders" like those mini-hamburgers from White Castle, bought by the sackful.  Or to Karmel Korn or Spudnut or a bakery redolent of bread smell that somehow reminded me of the French Revolution, which I believed to have been caused by a dearth of bread.

Summer also brought watermelon and sweet corn ("roastin' ears" old-time Hoosier still said), hot dogs, potato salad, tomatoes, fresh green beans.  Summer was the time of wholesale informality-old clothes, bathing suits, worn-out sneakers, baseball caps.  In all other seasons clothing was functional, stiff, thick, layered and confining.  Summer was carnival for Midwestern puritans, as close as they got to nymphs, satyrs and actual no-underwear nudity.

In winter we struggled to stay warm.  Toes, noses, fingers were reddened and burnt by frost.  Cold seeped into poorly insulated houses.  Furnaces produced too much or too little heat.  Everyone knew that cold made you "catch cold."  Diseases were more real and vivid then;  we still had smallpox (and round shoulder scars)-and scarlet fever, whooping cough, measles (several varieties), mumps, chicken pox, diphtheria, polio (the summertime scourge), before you even got in sight of exotica like meningitis, malaria, typhoid fever and a whole medical encyclopedia of nineteenth-century maladies that sounded like chapters from the Book of Revelations.

I was saved by antibiotics-penicillin came out of The War (along with sulfa drugs), and those astonishingly painful rump-shots of milky fluid propelled me through dismal bouts of pneumonia and flu over several critical years.  A decade earlier I would have been entry number 2,176,432 in the child mortality gazette and a cadet-sized tombstone on the family plot.

The years always followed their appointed rounds, probably because the school year dominated my life, nine months of  earnestly prescribed routine as invariable and traditional as stellar motion.  Each fall term began in naïve hope and dwindled through dire, endless winters, reaching the promise of spring and finally the liberation of summer.  I never considered that grown-ups had a different social clock, a calendar independent of schoolhouse certitudes.

I understood some rhythms of life outside mine-gardening season, hunting and fishing seasons, vacation time-when other people followed loved obsessions or hobbies or interests.  But those patterns did not rule me, were as alien as movie travelogue shots of dancing Hottentots or Indians carving totem poles.

I had no imaginative access to lives that did not wheel around my seasons and the steady march from fourth grade to fifth grade, from grade school to junior high.  My boyhood life was imbued with a deep illusion of progress, of a steady and measurable growth, like my body's constant change and development.  I might have been acquiring rings, like a sapling.  I had no notion of life on a plateau, of life measured in decades, not months.  "When I grow up-" was a mantra and a wish without real meaning, without a sense of what that other, slower time might be.

Childhood is a "floating world" in which time is flexible, predictable and mysterious all at once.  We experience agonies of waiting and suspense but also pass through corridor-like periods empty of duration and significance-the hours sitting by a fast-moving, shallow creek, watching crawdads and minnows and jesus bugs were incommensurable, not registered on earthly clocks or calendars.  A late afternoon softball game in mid-August was played out in a paradisal zone beyond chronology and consciousness of duration.  Jaques had it right in his Seven Ages of Man-anticipation vs. participation.  From outside moments are protracted, sometimes as a static as the little scenes in a snowball globe, waiting for a hand to animate it.  From inside the same moments are undetectable, seamless in their attachment to the flow of life.

But as a child I looked for evidence of time, of change and repetition in the cycle of the year.  The distant sound of the sinister furnace vacuum, keening like an imprisoned troll over the housetops, reassured me that there was an eternal return of spring.  The ritual of beeswaxing the Flexible Flyer runners affirmed the reality of winter and the death of the year.  A battered softball spangled with grass-stain, resting in the pocket of my Rawlings outfielder glove, was the emblem and escutcheon of high summer.

Children, as they understand that change is a fuel in their bones and cells, also know that the world sometimes stands still, that last year comes again in a different guise, that what was becomes what will be.
 

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William J. Schafer is a Kentucky resident, who, after a number of years of working on book-length publications, is trying to get back to essays and short fiction.  He has been published in periodicals like North American Review, Carleton Miscellany, North Dakota Review, Indiana Writes and The Minnesota Review.