Sing Praises of spring in black rubber boots
 

Outside the window is what radio announcers call snow-flurry activity.   They call it that to lend pith 
and moment to a thing as ordinary as snow falling.   Any fool can say snow is falling.   It takes a radio 
announcer with a trained and resonant voice to handle snow-flurry activity.

However since this is the hinder end of April, few other activities would be as pithy or momentous as 
snow falling.   No more needs to be said.   Dressing it up as snow-flurry activity is like gilding the 
poison ivy.

What we have our hearts set on is sunshine-and-warmth activity.   Balmy activity.   A little gentle-
breezes-under-the-azure-skies-of-spring activity.   And if that takes awhile to brew up in the cauldron of 
the elements, that’s fine; we’re perfectly happy to pull on our rubber boots and get out and splootch 
around in the basic ingredient of springtime - the mud.

We’d go blind

Rubber boots are the thing.   Today we sing of rubber boots.   Rubber boots are what you need in you 
want to meet E. E. Cummings’ mud-luscious world on its own turn.   And don’t call them Wellies or 
gumboots or anything pretentious, call then rubber boots and mean the real things, the real McCoys, 
black rubber boots with orange rubber soles and orange rubber trim around the top.

Accept no substitutes, we used to wear nothing else all spring long.   Rubber boots with the tops folded 
down maybe six inches (maybe eight inches!) to form a dashing, piratical cuff, and on the canvas lining 
we’d write our nicknames (“Slingshot”) and the names of things we truly and dearly love (The Maple 
Leaves, Janice).   We wore them all day in school an were told it would cause us to go blind.   Up to that 
point, wearing rubber boots all day ins school was the only known cause of blindness.

I had admired black rubber boots with orange rubber soles from the first time I remember seeing my 
grandfather fed the pigs.   That’s what he wore when he red them, nothing but the best.   When you’re a 
little kid, going with your grandfather in his rubber boots to feed the pigs is a spirited adventure.   I think 
that’s why rubber boots have always had a romantic connotation for me; whenever I put them on I 
expect something adventurous is going to happen.

What a strange thing that is about us, how we dress for our roles, put on special costumes.   A bowler or 
a baseball player or a golfer could all get by as well in the same shirts, but they don’t.   The have special 
shirts cut to set them apart, that tells them Now I am bowling. Now I am playing ball, Now I am teeing 
off.  This is what I wore when I worked here but, now I am the foreman, I wear this instead.   Dressed 
for mourning, we are downcast; dressed for the beach we glow.   Our costumes reassure us.   We might 
be faking it but anyone who sees us will think that we mean business.

We pull on our rubber boots.   They let us step bravely into a time of year, a time of life, when 
otherwise we might stay at home, nervous, uncertain, safe and dry.   Adventure is anything but safe and 
dry.

Here is a list of adventures we got into with our rubber boots on:

 Picking our way across a dike in the middle of a marsh, the day awash with sunshine and migrating 
ducks.  Behind us rose a black cliff of clo0ud that roared down upon us.   It was s snow squall and it 
very nearly smothered us.   The day, which had filled the whole sky, shrank until it was no more than a 
ragged bubble just beyond our outstretched arms.

Muskrat skedaddling

 Muskrats. We would stroll along and then - Splash! - we’d hear a splash near our feet and stop short, 
startled.   It would be a  muskrat, skedaddling.  Some feet away it would surface, swimming toward its 
twig teepee and muttering about day-trippers.