The first color to return to my beloved knobs in winter is yellow: first crocuses, then jonquils, daffodils, and now this: forsythia, also called golden shower by us hillbillies.

The yellows always remind me of this poem from Robert Frost (1874-1963):

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower.
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Titled "Nothing Gold Can Stay", the poem was written in 1923, and, in spite of its brevity, is regarded as one of his best.

Before long the yellows of early spring will give way to flowering trees, none of them yellow: redbuds, dogwoods, peaches, cherries, apples. For this little time, though, all is the color of sunshine and warmth. We still have cold spells coming--especially dogwood winter--but the yellow, like the scritchy love songs of the peepers, are a promise winter's all but gone.



And on that sweet note (sickeningly sweet?) fair thee well.

This morning we have our first significant snow of the season. Late, late--not totally a surprise, though; the blizzard of 1993 hit us on March 12, dumping two feet on us, and the second deepest in my lifetime, in the late 1980s, was fourteen inches on the third of April. Last night, as the snow front coming from Nashville ran headlong into our warmer air, we had a thunderstorm.

I wake early this AM (8:15, early for me). The ground being as warm as it has been the past few days (only three days ago temps at seventy degrees) I would have thought the ground was too warm for snow to lay, but it is. The crepe myrtle outside my bedroom window had begun to bud out; this morning the buds look like unripe berries kissed with snow. The car is covered; the cat comes in with snow melting on his fur, merely from standing on the porch. The snow is continuous, sometimes in great fluffy goosedown flakes, mostly in small fluttery ones dancing on a slow wind. Once in a while a blob falls off the roof with a thump; I'm sitting near a window, and jump and chuckle at the noise. The light coming in is dull, the world is gray and white, the only color being an occasional car or truck driving by on the wet ribbon of road.

I got to looking for paintings of snow and come up on this one by the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840):



And this one, by the American Andrew Wyeth (b. 19l7):



Back here in real life, it's wonderful to sit by the gas heater, Mom asleep in her recliner, the cat curled in a ball against her leg, TV a drone in the background, and look out at the snow. For this day, it's a welcome retreat.

And on that wintry note, fair thee well.

I love prehistoric art. The above painting is a copy of the original from the Hall of the Bulls in Lascaux, in France's Dordogne Valley. The originals--discovered by four teenage boys (probably playing hooky from school) on September 12, 1940, during the German occupation of France in WWII--are off limits; the cave complex was closed to public view in 1963, as carbon dioxide breathed out by visitors was visibly damaging the paintings. The paintings were painstakingly recreated in Lascaux II, a nearby visitors' center.

The paintings at Lascaux are at least sixteen thousand years old, but sites have been found that date back at least twice that.

The "bulls" of Lascaux and other sites are in fact aurochs, the extinct ancestor of modern domestic oxen. The last living wild aurochs died in the forests of Poland around the year 1627, but the species had been domesticated long before the time of Christ.



The debate goes on about whether cave art is religious, hunting magic, or merely decorative. As for me, I'm always reminded, looking at cave art, of the words Pablo Picasso spoke when he came back out into the light after visiting Lascaux: "We have invented nothing."

He was right: the cave artists made use of perspective in ways that were not rediscovered by Western art until the Renaissance of the fifteenth century A.D.

Looking at their artwork, I cannot think of the people who painted them as primitive. This level of sophistication is anything but characteristic of a "primitive" society. We give ourselves airs about our high level of sophistication, but if you stop and think about it, that's mostly thanks to our gadgets.



And on that superficially profound note, fair thee well.

Okay, we're all grownups here: let's explore the legend of Lady Godiva, the Saxon woman who, in order to persuade her husband to lift punitive taxes, rode naked, with nothing save her knee-length hair for cover, through the streets of eleventh century Coventry, England. To preserve her modesty, she asked all the people of the town, as it was then, to remain indoors and close all their doors and cover their windows, and since they held their lady in high esteem, they did so, all save for a nosey (and possibly sex-starved) tailor named Thomas, who looked out his window and for his trouble was immediately struck blind. He has gone down in history as the infamous Peeping Tom.



This painting of Lady Godiva was done circa 1898 by the Pre-Raphaelite artist John Collier.

Cute story, huh? Don't we all, ladies, occasionally have fantasies that the sight of us, clad in nothing except a curtain of hair, struck a man stone-blind? Hasn't it formed the basis of many a man's fantasy, the plot of many a movie (the most recent I know of being CALENDAR GIRLS, with Helen Mirren and Julie Walters, 2003)?

Not so fast.

I got the real scoop from a book. And Lady Godiva wasn't the pinup of the Middle Ages.

In his GREAT TALES FROM ENGLISH HISTORY: THE TRUTH ABOUT KING ARTHUR, LADY GODIVA, RICHARD THE LIONHEART, AND MORE (2003), Robert Lacey gives us the real lowdown on Lady Godiva.

To begin with, she was a kind and pious lady. In Saxon, her name was Godgifu--literally God-given. She was a landowner in her own right, with huge estates in the Saxon areas of eleventh century England. And she was married to a real winner named Leofric, who in 1042 helped put England's only royal saint, King Edward the Confessor, on the throne. She and her husband endowed the first church structure that stood on the site of what is now Coventry Cathedral.

The tale of Lady Godiva was first told around A.D. 1220 by a chronicler called Roger of Wendover. He does not mention anything of her being "naked" except "her fair legs."

Lacey speculates that Roger of Wendover copied his account from a Latin manuscript that once existed at Coventry, and that the account of "nakedness" may turn on a Latin verb: denudata, which literally means stripped--not necessarily of all clothing, but of all ADORNMENT-- that Lady Godiva, the gentle, pious and beloved, rode without the jewelry and fancy hairpins and sumptuous clothes she would have worn as befitting a major landowner and member of the Saxon nobility. In short, she rode out wearing, most likely, a modest undergarment, similar to a full length petticoat--and her hair fell around her because she did not pin it up with her jeweled pins.

The lady herself, who inherited her husband's estates upon his death in 1057, is last mentioned in history in the Domesday Book of 1087, those two giant volumes that take a complete inventory for William the Conqueror of all that his English subjects owned at the time of the Norman Conquest. That she is celebrated today as an audacious naked beauty would no doubt pain her.

That's not the worst of Lacey's explication, though: remember Peeping Tom, struck blind when he looked with lustful and curious eyes on the glorious Godiva? Roger of Wendover, the closest thing we have to an original source for the lady's act of kindness, doesn't mention him at all. Peeping Tom first enters history in about the year 1678--around the same time as an account of a rowdy Godiva procession through Coventry that attracted tens of thousands of visitors to that little Midlands market town. And we all know, tens of thousands of visitors means lots of money into the town coffers--

And on that exploitative note, fair thee well.

My late father was not an imaginative man, which is why I took his story of a strange day at Fort McClellan, Alabama, in the summer of 1963 seriously.

Dad had come home from the army in 1960, but was on reserve and therefore sent for training to Fort McClellan for two weeks that summer. On one particular day they were out on manuevers when they came up on a little cove surrounded by three hills--I am not familiar with Fort McClellan's geography; I'm just recalling the way Dad described it--and he said he got that odd feeling the French call deja vu--literally already seen; that feeling you've been in a place you KNOW you've never been before.

He told his fellow soldiers, "If we go back into that cove a little ways, we're gonna come up on a little ol' deserted log cabin."

They carried him high about that one, about how hillbillies are like that--but finally some of them accompanied him back into the cove. There, in a tangle of underbrush and tall trees, they found the log cabin--doorless, windowless, obviously long deserted.

But then, he said, he told them this: "If we go a few more yards into the woods, there's a grave back here too."

You guessed it. They walked back behind the cabin, into the woods, and there, in a tiny cleared place, they found a grave. Dad said it had a name and dates still legible on it; it was, if I remember right, a little girl's grave.

Dad had never been to Fort McClellan before, and never went back after those two weeks.

He had a few other stories like that: one about riding a train through Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, about five o'clock one morning, with mist rising off the river. He said, "That was the spookiest little town I ever saw. I wouldn't have been surprised in the least to look up and see old John Brown walk out of that fog."

John Brown, of course, was the radical abolitionist hanged in 1859 for his raid on the Federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry. He is, in fact, the most famous of Harper's Ferry's ghosts. I sort of think Dad always regretted not seeing him.

And one final story that he told about his time overseas:

Dad was stationed, during his European tour, at a base between Augsburg and Munich, in what was then West Germany. He wasn't very far from the dreadful concentration camp at Dachau; he often talked about how there was still an indescribable smell of death in the air on days of rain and fog and low clouds that came from there--fifteen years after it was liberated.

Just before he came home in 1960, they went on what he called a hundred mile road march that took them all the way to the border of Austria. He talked about how beautiful and clean the little towns they went through were--and about one little churchyard they passed.

The way I understood it, the church itself had been damaged during the Second World War; German troops, possibly SS, had been holed up in the sanctuary and Allied troops had used a tank gun to blow a hole into the side of the building to dig them out. There was a graveyard behind the church; it was walled in, with the back wall of the church being the fourth. The graves were all old ones, he said, surrounding a tall stone cross. There had been a murderous firefight among the graves, and every one of the tombstones was pocked and chipped by flying bullets.

There was not one single mark on the stone cross, though.

That always stayed with Dad, a not-especially-religious hillbilly boy, more than anything else he saw in Germany.

And on that solemn note, fair thee well.