Blog 269 – 04.08.2016

When I was a boy growing up in Tennessee we had four seasons. My mother’s least favorite season was winter and therefore her favorite season was spring. After three months of cold temperatures and mostly gray skies even my mother, not the most cheerful person under the best of circumstances, would perk up at the first red-breasted robin sighting or daffodil’s bloom.

One of my fondest springtime memories was the time that mom and dad picked my brother and I up after school with long cane fishing poles strapped to the side of the car. That meant a fishing trip and our first barefoot adventure since the previous summer. Many of our Yankee friends thought Tennessee children were barefoot year round but that was not true, only about half of the year, spring and summer.

My boyhood was full of so many reasons to love spring best of the four seasons – dogwood blossoms, all the trees dressed in green like a three month long Saint Paddy’s Day, and loads more time outside, a young boy’s dream come true. And yet as much as I loved the new birth of spring and the gloriously long summers of my youth autumn was back then my favorite season especially when the trees all put on their party dresses.

Some years ago I changed my mind about the seasons. Not that I love spring, summer, or even autumn less. I just decided to have no favorite but to enjoy them all equally. In the play and movie Camelot, Lance sings to Jenny:

“If ever I would leave you it wouldn’t be in summer…autumn…winter…springtime…Oh no, not in springtime, summer winter or fall. No, never would I leave you at all.”

My second wife sang that song to me at our wedding but she did leave me as Lance left Jenny. All relationships are destined to end, if not before, when one or the other dies,  all except one. I believe every true love song like Lance’s to Jenny speaks of a higher love than human, a divine love between a divine Parent and a divine Child, between a divine Husband and a divine Wife, between a divine Creator and the divine Part taken out of Him to make a divine Helpmeet.

There is only One that could ever be our One and Only. And that One alone can promise to never leave us in any of the four seasons. “Oh, no, not in springtime, summer, winter, or fall. No, never would I leave you at all”

Your friend and fellow traveler,
David White