Here we go. Another season!
I mean the growing season. And the baseball season. Those two mirror and complement each other so perfectly as to be like art. A number of writers have made that association. None better than Bart Giamatti, the former commissioner who died too young.
He wrote of baseball, “It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”
A lot of good writing is about heartache. I look up Giamatti’s quote when I want to feel melancholy. Feeling a little sad is like enjoying an occasional rainy day; they make you appreciate the sunny days.
Anyway, the growing season is what I do (farmer), and the baseball season is what I love (fan). We are on the front end of both. Winter is giving up her grasp haltingly, as cold and wind greet us when we step out the door and go back in to get a heavier coat. Neither planting nor the Twins season is off to a great start. But there’s always tomorrow, right?
I like to sneak to a game before planting to meet up with former Sleepy Eye kid Bill Moran. Bill is my go-to when it comes to all-things Twins. Spending a few hours at various spots around Target Field with Bill gets me ready for the 162-game dash. He fills me in on areas of optimism and concern.
Last Wednesday, the weather report wasn’t terrible. That’s as good as it gets this spring. I bought a $4 ticket entitling me to pay $12 for a beer. I walked out on the plaza in rightfield and took in that glorious green field, a moment I look forward to all winter. Right then it started sleeting. The rain quit eventually, but it stayed cloudy and cool. The Twins got one hit, made some bad plays, and lost 7 to 0. Regardless it was a day at the ballpark, and any day at the ballpark is a good day.
It’s April, so I’m predicting a World Series for the Twins and 200-bushel corn for my fields. I’ve predicted a World Series for the Twins for sixty straight years so don’t go placing any bets on account of me. Two hundred bushels isn’t that uncommon now, so I’ll shoot for 250 as long as we’re being wildly optimistic. Spring does that. Until the losses pile up or drought settles in, there’s hope for the best.
That’s the thing about a new season. Anything is possible. All my rows could be straight and clean. The garden will be abundant, the apple trees full of perfect red fruits in September. Byron Buxton could play 160 games. The Twins might even beat the Yankees in the playoffs.
Okay, maybe not that last one. But you get the point. If you can’t be insanely idealistic in April, when can you be?
A season is a manageable piece of time. We’ll know in a half year how any of this works out. It is more a sprint than a marathon. You can give it your full attention, whether it’s the crops or the baseball season, knowing the day will come when the equipment is put away and the last pitch is thrown.
Having done this a while, I know the routine. Winter follows. I don’t look forward to winter. But I know it’s out there, and there will be a chance to live that slower pace again. It’s not quite hibernating, but there’s time to spend under a blanket with a book that summer doesn’t afford.
The seasons have been metaphor as long as people have used words. Spring lends itself to birth and beginnings, summer to growth, fall to completion, winter to sleep and, yes, death. We understand things in comparison to the time it takes the Earth to go around the sun.
Not everything happens in 12-month chunks, but we still refer to seasons. Lives, marriages, organizations, even nations have a beginning and an end, with growth and decline in between. I saw my grandson for Easter. We have fun with the fact that he is six and I am sixty-six. He is somewhere in May, and I am in September. He is the young corn plant, vibrant green, shooting up to the sky. I am the mature stalk, hoping to stay upright till harvest.
One could spend hours making comparisons to seasons. Pam’s and my marriage is past the intense, giddy days of spring when stormy days alternate with bright sun. We’re settling into a comfortable autumn of gentle breezes and agreeable temperatures.
There is much talk about our nation and western democracies. Are they in a decline with dark days of authoritarian winter ahead? What about religions that are struggling with numbers right now? Is this autumn for them or a cloudy spell before the sun comes back out?
We don’t know for sure who wrote Ecclesiastes. Tradition held it was Solomon, although scholars doubt that. Whoever it was, 2,500 years before Bart Giamatti, someone was thinking of the seasons and humankind:
“For everything there is a season,
A time for every activity under heaven.
A time to be born and a time to die.
A time to plant and a time to harvest.”
It goes on: kill and heal, tear down and build up, cry and laugh, grieve and dance, embrace and turn away, tear and mend, be quiet and speak, love and hate. Sadly, Ecclesiastes reports there is a time for war, as we are learning again, and a time for peace, as we pray again for.
Alas, all these, good and not so good, are as predictable as the greening of the Earth in the spring and the browning in the fall.
If Ecclesiastes were written today, it might include “A time to bunt and a time to swing away. A time to bring the infield in and a time to play the line.” So, here we go, the 2022 season. Best to you in your own planting, whether that’s corn, tomatoes, or a pot of marigolds. And go Twins.