The return of Spring and Nathan Turner.

Well, it's that time of year again folks.

The birds fly North, UC coeds don brightly-colored sundresses and flipflops. White fratboys in polo shirts get loud and drunk in their frathouse yards while throwing beanbags at plywood cornhole sets and cheering each other on. The raggedly un-pruned crabapple trees on Pullan Avenue bloom fragrantly. Their perfumed smell wafts out over the rose-tinted evening at sunset on a Friday, mixing with the scent of dank marijuana smoke and hot blacktop. Outdoors more often, we hear the familiar sounds that winter has denied us. Kids play in the street, racing each other around and forming a joyous cacophony. (A small boy on a skateboard insists on showing me his trick of jumping over the curb.) Scrap-metal-laden freight trains rumble past the neighborhood heading north out of the CSX yard in Camp Washington. Dogs engage in impotently fierce barking contests from the packed-dirt pads behind their chain-link fences. Beat-down clunkers with cheater spare wheels chug by, the sounds of their under-compressed engines betraying their faulty exhaust systems. Taped-on clear plastic flaps in the breeze from their smashed windows. Apartment-dwelling black families congregate on the stained sidewalks in front of their buildings, relaxing on plastic chairs. Loud hip-hop blares from the stereo of a nearby parked car, windows all rolled down to form an improvised outdoor stereo. Neighborhood bars re-open their outdoor patios, allowing patrons to return happily to simultaneous smoking and drinking. Ghetto teenagers return to their posts holding down corners. Dandelion weeds re-sprout in the cracks in the sidewalks. The feral bushes that have taken root around the abandoned houses on Fergus sprout new leaves to form a green canopy that partially obscures the blight and neglect. Noisy hordes of squealing kids appear everywhere riding bicycles with training wheels and dragging toy wagons. The playground is suddenly filled; a boy with a dirty t-shirt perches on the fence and watches younger children play on the swings. Vivid flowers suddenly sprout from dirt that has been barren for months. And for some reason I saw five squad cars racing past my house last night with sirens blaring. Apparently something interesting happened down by the Gypsy Hut at Dane and Spring Grove. Warm weather always brings out the more exciting aspects of urban life.

It is Spring in inner-city Cincinnati.

In the words of Pete Seeger, the Byrds, and the King James Bible:

"To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance..."

And so we find ourselves in the time to plant, to be born, to laugh, and to dance.

For it is Spring. Our daffodils and tulips have returned to us. And so has Nathan Turner, esq., who has an art show tonight at Creative Gallery on Main Street in Over The Rhine. I plan to go to see some old friends and enjoy what I expect to be joyfully non-pretentious art - something I believe to be a general rarity. I think that the ridiculousness of the Fine Art world was quite accurately (and only partially satirically) captured by the privileged excess and snobby weirdness of the vagina-obsesessed conceptual artist Maude Lebowski from the Coen Brothers film The Big Lebowski. This will be the first art event I have gone to in years, since I lost interest in Art (with a capital 'A') after dropping out of the Art Academy and feeling rather lost when my creative flow withered away as a result of general emotional toxic overload.

So that should be nice.

I love the spring. I miss spending it outside watching the world come back to life. Spring is magical. The long death of winter ends and the entire world is miraculously reborn. Flowers and plants and new life emerge from barren soil and rocks. Bugs and birds and frogs and flowers emerge anew.

It is a time to collect flowers, to smell them and relish the life they signal returning. It is a time to dig sassafras (although that should have been done weeks ago) and collect herbs. It is a time to hatch chickens and birth lambs and calves. It is a time to plant vegetables. Right now the early ones are ripe for picking: lettuce, carrots, radishes, snow peas. In a few weeks the Frost Date will be here and we can put out tomatoes and corn and beans and melons and squash and everything else. No wonder the pre-Roman Conquest European pagans made a big deal about Spring and made idols of rabbits and eggs and such. I wonder what traditional African peoples do for Spring. I'm sure they have some awesome shindig that beats the pants off Easter. I was invited to Cincinnati's Nigerian Ibo New Yam festival last year, but I could not attend. But I think that was in the fall.

But I gotta say, my sinuses have been crazy since I got back from Boston. If you don't have fucked up allergies yet, just move to Cincinnati and you will.