I’ve hesitated to proclaim it “spring”, even though it officially began seven weeks ago.

Maybe it’s the deep winter that just wouldn’t end, after several that just wouldn’t start.  Or perhaps it’s the creep of pessimism that dampens middle age if one doesn’t consciously avoid it.  Or, just maybe, this spring is normal.

Our vines began their rise from dormancy about a month ago, and broke buds just this week, after very early starts in recent years.  They popped several weeks early last year and in 2010 they were more than a month ahead.  This spring they’re right on schedule.  Hallelujah.

I, for one, am ready for normal, by which I mean familiar or even predictable.  That’s not to say I eschew excitement or that I’m happiest on a hamster wheel, but I’d like a break from the volatility that’s taken the weather, global economy and dare I say politics to extremes.  Permanent whitewater, as the once popular metaphor goes, gets old after a while.

The familiar offers comfort, be it the face of an old friend or, on this weekend especially, one’s mother.  It can be a sacred place from childhood, hopefully unchanged, or old music that bends time and space, taking one back to a younger and perhaps vastly different life.  We all need those comforts, anywhere and anytime we can find them.

Just this early morning I stood in the cool damp fog and told my daughter – who turns eleven tomorrow – that she was born on a morning just like this one.  And when she looked up at me and smiled as only a daddy’s girl can do, I never imagined I could love a misty morning in May greater than this.

Then a few moments later I found our cellar master sitting in his car, engine off but radio on and volume up.  Way up.  And there in our parking lot still thick with fog stood his colleague, Agnes, yelling over the music in her endearing patois of Polish/English/Bayonne, NJ, “Eh, John, you comin’ to work today or what?”

It was then I could see from his smile that his mind was elsewhere, back around 1979.  I knew the music well, and for a moment my mind wandered somewhere else, too.  Thumbs-up I signaled, “louder”.  And so he did.  Happy Spring.

The Core
Eric Clapton, Marcy Levy
Slowhand

Every morning when I wake, a feeling soon begins to overtake me.
Ringing in my ears resounds through my brain; it finally surrounds me.
There is fire, there is life, there is passion, fever and fury.
There is love and there is hate, there is longing, anger and worry.

Oh, I have a flame; feel it touch my heart.
And down at my core is the hottest part.
I can burn without fuel.

If it should become too cold, I know I can endure the frostbite.
Oh, a blanket then I’ll wrap around me; I keep myself so close to my side.
No one then can cause me harm, just as the river runs into the sea.
‘Cause every day, your fire alarm is deafening the silence all around me.

Oh, I have a flame; feel it touch my heart.
And down at my core is the hottest part.
I can burn without fuel.

It is burning.
It is burning.

You can trust me; we can laugh. Together we can share our sorrow.
I will give you secrets too, an attitude that you may borrow.
Gypsy woman said to me, “One thing you must bear in your mind:
You are young and you are free, but damned if you’re deceased in your own lifetime.”

Oh, you have a flame; feel it in your heart.
And down at the core is the hottest part.
We can burn without fuel.

It is burning.
It is burning.