Right on schedule, spring green takes a firm grip

It must have been the spring of 1953 or 1954 that it clicked in my brain: Seasons are not random. They follow a schedule, one following after the other year after year.

I don't know what I thought about the arrival of weather changes before this epiphany. Maybe I simply thought God or someone deputized by him got up every day and decided what weather we would have.

Certainly, I didn't have a clue about hemispheres at that time. Little did I know that when it was spring in Southeast Missouri it was fall in Australia. Or that when we were sweating through July and August Australians might well be sledding and having snowball fights.

This revelation about the regularity of seasons occurred when my mother drove us to the one-room Mill Creek School where she taught in the Ozarks over yonder. My mother taught in several one-room schools as rural districts were being swallowed up by larger districts, usually based in a town. This meant fewer schoolhouses and fewer teachers, but more yellow buses.

Mill Creek School only had a dozen or so pupils from three or four nearby families. To get to the school, we had to drive up the hill from our farm, down the blacktop to the river bridge, go through the village of Mill Spring and then through woods -- mostly national forest -- and down into the Mill Creek valley where the white frame school sat close to the gravel road.

The schoolyard went up a hill toward the boys' toilet. When we played softball, any stray hits could well roll back down the hill to the sawed-off board that designated the pitcher's mound. Any ball hit past the toilet was an automatic home run. The girls' toilet, by the way, was in far right field, which meant girls didn't have to climb a hill to use the facility.

On this particular April Day I watched the morning sunlight flicker through the trees. I realized nearly all the trees -- mostly oaks of several varieties -- had fresh green miniature leaves, enough to spread color through the forest but far from fully formed.

I decided to remember the date for at least a year to see if the new leaves would be emerging again on the same point of the calendar. The date: April 24.

Not all trees, and certainly not all oaks, put out leaves at exactly the same time. But April 24 seemed to be a reasonable date one could expect forest to look more green than winter's gray.

Farmers in those parts had all sorts of natural signs to guide them in their husbandry. For example, most everyone tried to get potatoes planted in the garden by March 17, St. Patrick's Day.

And anyone planning to plant a field of corn knew the time to stick the seeds into the ground was when white oak leaves were as big as a squirrel's ears.

Looking out the window of the car that day, I could see so much of the world I took for granted was meshed together in ways that were logical and, from certain perspectives, useful. For example, most everyone we knew relied on the farmer's almanac for guidance, including under what moon sign to butcher a hog so the bacon wouldn't shrivel away when fried for breakfast.

As I am writing this, I have a wonderful window view of my neighborhood, parts of which become abundantly more visible as leaves drop in the fall. There is a line of gorgeous cypress trees across the way, and when their leaves are fully formed, I won't be able to see some of my neighbors' houses at all. But already there is a green glow hovering over the houses as other trees have put on a fresh coat to leaves.

And the willow-leaf oak in my yard, one of the last trees to leaf out each year, has thick wads of future leaves all over its otherwise bare branches -- if you don't count the mockingbirds that perch there to keep track of a certain feline that appears from time to time.

The view is remarkably like the emerging leaves in the forest that day in the early 1950s.

A glance at the calendar makes me smile.

April 24, 2018.

The world has changed so much in so many ways over all those years. But you and I both know some things are constant, reliable and predictable.

This is the season for savoring everything we can count on.

Joe Sullivan is the retired editor of the Southeast Missourian.