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Summertime in the BelgradesContentsfor Printing
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Albert and the Poetsby Don Watson A pale April sun does little to warm my back as I tug at tangled branches, all that's left of the ancient oak tree felled in the wrath of January. As the brushpile grows higher and longer, dozens of tree sparrows move in twitching nervously from limb to limb. Bulbs planted last fall poke little green fingers through the unraked leaves and one crocus, as softly purple as a Highland thistle smiles through the debris. In the distance the wheeze and clatter of Albert Sproul's old truck keens through the silent spring morning. The truck, a green hand-painted 1946 Studebaker, lurches into the driveway, crushes an emerging Hosta plant, then stops. Albert Sproul, at eighty years old, falls rather than steps out of the cab, adjusts his green Dickie Shirt and pants, and shuffles towards me. "How you doing, Albert?" "Doin'." I cleared the leaves away from the flower bed and more crocuses pushed their colored heads toward the sun. We looked at the flowers for a long time as if expecting something magical to occur. "Pretty," Albert said. "Reminds me of all them colors they got up at the K-Mart." He walked away as if to study the crocuses from a distance. Albert pulled his cap down a little tighter over his eyes. "This woman I seen on the T and V got all these new colors, better than spring, that she dreams up and the store mixes 'em into paint. She says you can paint a twig or an old stone and bring the season right into your parlor. She even showed Mother, that's my wife, Mother, how to twist our old grapevines into hoops." He look at me and smiled. "Then, of course, you paint 'em." The sun, weak but welcome, was yielding to brooding clouds scudding in from the western mountains. We turned to see the black Kennebec roll towards Popham and felt a sudden chill as the early spring sun collapsed behind solemn nimbus clouds. "April can get some peckish," Albert said as he hunched against the off-river wind. Peckish? How would that sound? "April is a peckish month?" Poets who have waxed lovingly of spring never lived in Maine. They never saw the icy claws of winter recede into a morass of boot-grabbing mud that precedes the invasion of black flies. Then summer, that short and glorious time comes and erases it all. Confusion still plagues me as to which alphabet poet, E.B., T.S., or e.e. said "April is the cruelest month." It makes little difference whether the poets or Albert Sproul have placed the correct adjectve on spring. Cruel? Yes. Peckish? Yes. But after the brutal bath of winter we welcome the soft small crocuses and summy daffodils. We wallow through the leaves unraked. Left by reluctant oaks and stand, face to the juvenile sun. "Peckish?" I say to Albert. "Peckish?" "Ayuh." He turned toward the truck to leave. "And if you find this peckish, get ready for the summer people." Don Watson, Hallowell resident and observer extraordinaire, is the author of The View from Powderhouse Hill, in which this short story appeared. All rights are reserved by the author. Read another short story by Don Watson | ||