Spring Fever, 2007

Forget NASCAR.
Forget the Kentucky Derby.
Forget the Sadie Hawkins Day Race.
Forget the rush to the hardware store for plywood and duct tape when the weatherman says a hurricane is headed your way.
The camera crews may miss it, and it rarely makes the nightly news, but there is no greater mad dash in America than that which takes place in New England when we get a sunny Saturday in April.
April showers bring May flowers is a cute little weather cliché that does little to mask the madness that spreads like a brushfire when we get one good day out of 30 at this time of year.
You would think we would know what’s coming by now, and organize ourselves ahead of time. There are those among us who have their mowers tuned up, their fertilizer bags stacked, and the Tiki lamps fueled and at the ready well before the end of March – but they are still not immune to the fever.
It seems to sneak up on us, every year.
Leading up to this past Saturday, April had been typically murky. The drabness of the weather even seemed bearable, especially in consideration of the way the recently departed winter had wimped out – at least ‘round here.
But make no mistake, the cold, the gray, and the occasional snow had still taken a toll, psychologically, on all of us, and we were more than ready - in fact well beyond eager - we were actually chomping at the bit (or on the remote control if a bit wasn’t readily available) for a chance get off the couch and do something, anything, as long as we were doing it under a shining sun.
And then of course – perfect timing, a massive storm began moving through the country – left to right, with the weathermen gleefully promising that we would soon be swimming in it, literally, for days.
If you had forgotten, you realized then that April showers, in fact, bring flooded basements, turn charming country roads into boulevards of mud, and seem to carry with them more than their fair share of viruses that had – my theory, lay dormant in the cold soil until this time of the year.
And so – along with the normal chorus of sneezes and sniffles, a wave of panic swept from house to house, from Bangor to Hartford, as everyone realized at the same time that “this might be the last sunny Saturday for weeks!”
The race was on!
At Lowes and Home Depot the stainless steel gas barbeques were lined up like storm troopers, for as far as the eye could see – and soon began boarding a thousand oversized SUVS.
At a dozen or so lawn and garden stores, endless trays of flowers were teased into bloom and pushed out the door faster than burgers at a fast food joint.
That vibration you felt underfoot as you tentatively tread your soggy lawn for the first time in several months, wasn’t a minor earthquake, it was Roto-Tillers by the hundreds, turning the earth inside out.
That buzzing sound you heard wasn’t the long awaited Killer Bees, finally moving north from Texas; it was fertilizer companies in their cute little pastel trucks, swarming into your suburban enclave.
Were there games being played at the town’s ballfields? Not really. But the recreations areas were crowded with aspiring Little League coaches who sought to prove their mettle by wheeling load after load of loam onto the ballfields, which the weather, a day or so later, licked off the base paths like frosting off a cake.
According to statistics gathered by my crack team of crank callers:
1673 new mailboxes were installed on this sunny Saturday.
45,555 pounds of weed and feed were spread, in clumps and clods and the occasional fine spray of pellets.
Though there was no precipitation it still rained - buckets of mulch.
1104 moldy plastic pieces of deck furniture were rescued from sheds, carefully evaluated, and then taken to the dump.
1773 new pieces of plastic deck furniture were rapidly purchased and promptly put on the deck where the expected rainfall would soon begin to lay the foundation for new mold and mildew.
Enough charcoal was sold to power the space shuttle, and men braver than me stood out in the cold that evening, in short sleeves, talking to themselves, waving tongs and knives in the air, under the delusion that they were having a summer barbeque.
Liquor stores reported that beer purchases were way, way, up, but – according to my friend Dan, with temperatures in the high 40’s consumption lagged.
Baseball gloves sold like hotcakes, while hotcake sales were slow.
In order to accommodate the madness, the Cape Cod Tunnel was open to all, and the Red Sox played with the dome open.
Rome wasn’t built in a day – the saying goes, but New Englanders took their best shot at it this past Saturday.