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(Leon Hale)
The regular customers may remember that this is an annual trip that I've made for years with my Old Friend Morgan. O.F. is not with me because he's still down in the quilts with a case of bad health. But I'm still making the trip, partly because it pleases O.F. for me to keep doing it, and partly because so many of the regular customers have urged me to continue. Why this expedition to meet spring has stirred the interest of so many customers is a great mystery to me, but it's been fun. Last year I had a couple of e-mails from people who thought this trip was stupid. I wrote back and thanked them for reading about it anyway. Most of the meet-spring mail has been favorable, so here I am headed south again. The reason for going is familiar to the longtime customers, but for new ones I feel obliged to provide a little background:
O.F. said, "What if we died and never again experienced another spring?" I thought that would be perfectly awful and O.F. said then, "What we ought to do is go south until we meet spring, just to know for sure that it's on the way, and to be certain we'll experience spring at least one more time." So the first week of March we loaded up and drove south. We depend on mesquite trees to tell us when we've found spring. We both grew up in mesquite country where our elders preached entire sermons on this text: Mature mesquite trees never put on new foliage until after the danger of a killing frost has passed. So, when we find mature mesquites in South Texas producing significant new foliage, we declare that's where the leading edge of spring is. We go into it -- spring, that is -- and celebrate it, and go in and out of it. Then we head back home, satisfied. Temporarily, anyhow. O.F. has named this trip Primavera, the pretty Spanish word for spring. (It's also an Italian word for spring, as a couple of the customers have told me.) He has added a Roman numeral to provide sophistication and significance. I believe the last time O.F. came with me was on Primavera XX, the 20th year. If that's right, I'm now on Primavera XXV. Possibly Primavera XXVI. I hate to be vague like that. But O.F. always kept the Primavera archives, with details on exactly where we found spring on what year. And then he got sick, and couldn't come, and the archives haven't been kept properly. From Houston or wherever we begin the search, we come down U.S. 59. Through Richmond, Rosenberg, Wharton, El Campo, Ganado, Edna, Victoria, Goliad and on into the Brush Country. We've always tried to go the first week of March, or at least within the first 10 days.
Over the years we've gotten acquainted with a few ancient mesquites outside Goliad. O.F. calls them indicator trees. If those old characters are putting out their earliest curly green twigs, it usually means we have less than a hundred miles to go before we find the cutting edge of spring. But this time they weren't even showing swelled-up buds. This could mean a later spring than the average, according to the mesquite theory. I stopped in Beeville to check a nice mesquite I know at the corner of Archer Street and U.S. 59. It has a few green shoots, but this is a town tree and town mesquites don't always tell you the truth about weather. So here I am in George West, the county seat of Live Oak County, about halfway between San Antonio and Corpus Christi, where my Sunday deadline has stopped me.
I've got a feeling I'll need to go another hundred miles at least before I find spring. |