A touch of spring

Spring raised the hem of her winter woolens this week and showed off her brilliant forsythia petticoat.

Which means it's time to open the Sullivan patio for another season of lazy sessions of sitting on cushioned wicker furniture and listening to the gurgling water in the rock fountain while the scarlet cardinal belts out a territorial tune to taunt Miss Kitty, who pays no heed now that she gets to snooze on soft floral prints without being told to go to "your chair" in the family room, which has been the case for four cold winter months.

Our patio is a great afternoon getaway, with brick-and-glass walls on two sides, a curving euonymus hedge on the other two sides and a giant magnolia blocking the sun as it settles toward the western horizon. On our patio it is possible to imagine you're just about anywhere: a Southern plantation, a cozy Parisian courtyard, even a seaside wind shelter with an ocean view just around the corner.

Opening the patio means changing the wreaths on the door and straightening what few rocks have tumbled from the fountain during the winter, since there isn't a stitch of mortar to be found in the 4,000-pound jumble of granite and sandstone and quartz and agate and petrified wood collected by our family over all those years of traveling here and there without the means of buying any real souvenirs. Gravity. That's the underpinning of this fountain, like the chinked stone wall we saw in Greece, which made us wonder if we somehow had Hellenic ancestors.

Moving the wrought-iron stand with its pot of flowing ivy out of its winter corner is part of the ritual too, along with removing the utilitarian but not-so-very-pretty covers from the wicker glider and the two rockers. Rescuing the bright yellow cushions, with their pink-and-green floral patterns, from the garage is the icing on this outdoor treat.

Inevitably whenever we go through this well-orchestrated process, one of us will say, "Wouldn't our grandparents be proud of this?"

What that means is layered in family complexities. Simply put, our grandparents came from circumstances that would never have allowed spending money on, for example, comfortable furniture that would be, on purpose, put out in the rain.

As my wife and I sat on the patio Monday afternoon, my wife recalled our visit to my maternal grandmother's house down in a hollow in the Ozarks over yonder.

My wife noticed the front porch of the house had a fieldstone skirt, a feature not found on most porches of that era. My mother explained her mother built that, using rocks collected by her children. "Where did she get the mortar?" my wife asked. "From a store," my mother said. "Where did she get the money?" was the next question.

My mother had to think about that for a minute. Jobs that paid wages were few and far between. You ate what you grew or raised. You bartered for things you didn't have. You picked up some cash here and there doing odd jobs or working for other families who needed help taking care of dying relatives, or doing laundry and ironing, or preparing meals, or cleaning the house -- or all of the above.

One other source of income was gathering roots and plants for the flourishing companies that made homeopathic medicines -- snake oil, to be sure. My mother and her relatives would dig sassafras and collect wild plants in the woods and mail them off to Chicago, receiving quarters and nickels and dimes by return mail.

It wasn't exactly a get-rich-quick scheme, but it paid for a few niceties.

Yes, my grandmother would be proud of our patio. And, no doubt, would wonder why we were letting all that good fountain water go to waste.

jsullivan@semissourian.com