T.S. Eliot famously said that April is the cruelest month. But I suspect for many of us who live in the middle Southern states, it's February that breaks the heart. One day mild, with japonica, forsythia, Japanese magnolias, spring beauty, Quaker ladies bursting into bloom all around, and mourning doves calling, well, mournfully but beautifully in the shrubbery in the back yard.
And then the next day glum, gray, back to winter, often (before global warming) with a heart-breaking rime of snow and ice on the newly sprung jonquils. February tries the spirits and batters at the chambers of the heart in our part of the country.
This year, I'm feeling the doldrums a bit more, and as I think about why, I can identify two immediate reasons. One is the behavior of the Catholic bishops in recent weeks, and, even more, the behavior of their blind "liberal" co-belligerents who immediately signed onto their war against women's health care rights, women's health care needs.
I find all of this sickening in the extreme, and have just about had it with these folks. And with the destruction they seem so intent on wreaking not merely on the Catholic church, but on the entire nation--and because of the role the U.S. plays in the world, on the world at large.
The other reason I think I'm feeling a bit down right now is that I'm immersed (as I've previously noted) in studying and annotating the work of that uncle of mine several generations back, Wilson Bachelor, about whom several of us are writing a collaborative book. And as I re-read and add footnotes to his diary, I notice a yearly pattern in which the diary entries become plaintive just as February turns to March--a season still wintry in the part of Arkansas in which he settled, which is two hours to the north of Little Rock.
In 1874, on the first day of March, for instance, Bachelor wrote,
It is now about midnight, four years [obscured: "ago I"?] left Tennessee and was at this hour floating down The River. [O]ne year ago, [I] see from my diary, I was where [I] now am, on Mill Creek. I was then [“at”] 4 P.M. writing in my office writing. [T]o night March the 1st 1874 at midnight finds me up writing. I have been asleep, but am now up writing. [A]ll my family are sleeping while I have put on my Slippers and cloak and am writing. [ T]he Ple[i]ades ["are"] getting low in the west, while pale Cynthia, Queen of the heavens, Sheds her mild radiance, over the rocks and mountains. [A]ll nature seems lul[l]ed and silent and [nothing] is to be heard but the roar of Mill Creek, as it rushes through the Craggy rocks at the foot of Mill Creek mountain. [T]he last year that has passed has brought no great change to me. [B]ut it has had ["its"?] toils and care. I cannot say that I am either contented or happy. [Y]et I have been forced to remain here. I am Still practicing medicine, have a few select friends only who like myself love meditation, and Books. Sometimes I wish I was like those of whom some rhymes Said "fixed like a plant, one peculiar Spot; to draw nutrition, propagate and rot." [“But”] then again, I am glad, that nature [text torn: "has so"?] constituted my mind.
["After"] midnight March the 2nd 1874W. R. Bachelor
This passage is one in a recurring series throughout the diary, which runs from 1870 to 1902. As winter turns to spring but spring is still deferred, he sits at night in his study, year after year, his family asleep in the silent house, and writes by candlelight (he often refers to the candle burning beside him), looking at the stars, hearing the creek roaring near his house, and remembering the family's fateful decision to move from Tennessee to Arkansas in 1870. These passages often lament the lack of intellectual companionship he had found on the frontier, and speak about how books had become his companion in his solitude--books and the guitar music he played to himself (and, as his children grew, the music the whole family played together many evenings).
The lines that begin with "fixed like a plant" are from Pope's "Essay on Man," by the way, though he slightly misquotes the couplet. The next diary entry on 15 March will note that the weather was disagreeable--wet and cold--and he had taken his two youngest sons on a climb up the mountain that day, and was writing again at night, as the family slept.
In that entry, he will note again that the dreary weather depresses his spirits as he grows older, and that he can think of no better way to express his feelings than by quoting from Byron's "I Would I Were a Careless Child": "The world was ne’er designed for me," and "Oh! that to me the wings were given/ which bear the Turtle to her nest!/ Then would I cleave the vault of heaven,/ to flee away and be at rest."
The preceding entries occur immediately after records of four hair-raising medical cases, which would be enough to pull down the spirits of anyone. They include a stabbing (the stabbed man and his friends were waiting for Bachelor when he came home from a lecture on the abuses of the English language by his friend Paul Graham, for whom he would name his last daughter Pauline Graham Bachelor in July the same year), a gunshot wound (a man waylaid and shot in the back), a stillborn premature baby, and a recalcitrant case of typhoid pneumonia from which the patient appeared too weak to recover well. Later in the year, he'll record in his diary that in four years and four months in Arkansas, he had heard more reports of people dying by violence than in all his years growing up in Tennessee.
Depression, then. That's February in the mid-South, for some souls--and, it seems, perhaps remarkably so for some members of my family down the generations, particularly for those of us with a bookish bent, given to a certain interest in matters religious, cultural, political.
February has always had quite specific family associations for me, as well--ones that bring to mind beloved family members no longer with me. I've noted (probably to a point that tries readers' patience) my particular love for my mother's oldest sister Katherine/Kat.
Because Kat never drove, on any family trip--even ones around the city to run errands--she was relegated to the back seat with us children, where she functioned as a kind of nanny to keep us occupied and out of the hair of the adults in the front seat. Her purse was a bottomless font of treats including delicious soft candies in beautiful wrappers. Kat had a horror of choking, which may have had to do with the fact that a primitive doctor had swabbed out her tonsils with acid when she was a little girl, leaving her with a lifelong throat problem.
So hard candies were strictly forbidden in her household and in her pocketbook, but soft ones--particularly the soft, yielding pillows of spun peppermint that she continued mailing to me even when I was in college, because I loved them so--were always to be had in abundance. These, and Kat's truly amazing instructional narratives as we passed this or that sight, kept us from bothering my mother, her mother (who happens, by the way, to be the Batchelor family connection for me: Wilson Bachelor was her father's uncle), other aunts sitting in the front seat as we drove around in my childhood, etc.
One of Kat's favorite pursuits as we drove hither and yon was to point out scenes of natural beauty, and to explain to us precisely what was beautiful about the scenes. No one was more adept than she was at spotting a wild plum tree laden with plums, or a patch of succulent blackberries, or a tree full of green apples, which she loved for their tartness. Not only did she spot, but she expected the car to stop to permit us to pick, when she could have her way.
And then there were jonquils, which began appearing on street corners around the city in February, in large buckets at the feet of country people who brought them into town for sale. They provided a beautiful and very welcome splash of bright yellow on gray February days. A friend of mine is the daughter of an artist who grew up just outside Little Rock, and my favorite of all the paintings her mother has done is one of a jonquil seller with a bucket of yellow flowers at her feet, and an umbrella to shield herself and the flowers from the cold rain.
Because Kat taught me to see the jonquils on February drives through the city even when I was a tiny boy, I never passed a corner that had one of these flower-sellers standing on it without clapping my hands, jumping up and down, and screaming: "Jonakils! Jonakils!"
And so I became Jonakil Bill to my aunt Kat.
Who is much on my mind these days as a rather trying winter turns to a still-feeble spring. And as the important people of the world, who make the decisions that determine the lives and futures of the little people who include me, seem devoid of plain good sense and plain human decency.
Leading me to wonder with that long-ago uncle of mine and with Byron and German poet Klaus Groth (O wüßt ich doch den Weg zurück, den lieben Weg sum Kinderland) how not to lose the path back to childhood memories and the child's heart, even as I grow old and gray and rather glum about the possibilities of meaningful redemption in the kind of world those with power seem intent on crafting for all of us these days.
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