Puddle-Crunch Wonderful

Ahhh, Lent, when the world is puddle-crunch wonderful....

My apologies, of course, to e e cummings, and his poem about spring. Where I grew up, in north central Minnesota, Lent was a harbinger of spring, and somehow the ideas just kinda meshed.

I realize that for some Lent is a time of ritualized sacrifice, a lead-in to the crucifixion and the celebration of Easter, me-tooism at its Christian best. For some it's the hangover from Mardi Gras, that time to party hearty for tomorrow and for weeks after we celebrate death. For much of the world, by the time Lent arrives, it's already what we Minnesotans would celebrate as spring: mild weather, sunshine, the start of the growing season. Heck, by the time Easter rolls around, most of the country can even hold egg rolls or hunts outside in the grass!

We're lucky if by Easter we can see the dead brown remains of last season's grass in patches through the remaining snow. Nobody'd subject their kids to an egg hunt in that mess! Still, Easter holds the promise of spring arriving, and sometime during Lent every year it became manifest in a very particular way.

It's ideal maple syruping time, with days above freezing and nights below, when the sap flows at its heaviest. Of course, most of us didn't tap trees for sap. We did, however, walk outside. There the snow melted a bit during the days, and refroze into ice puddles at night. Sometime after the surface of those puddles froze, the lower parts remained liquid, slowly draining away. What remained were air bubbles, tempting white shapes under thin ice, ready for any kid who came along to stomp on and break: crunch! crunch! crunch! Those of us who really found this an entertaining diversion from the usual dreariness of winter got positively energetic about breaking every possible piece of ice along our paths. Crunch! Crunch! Crunch! If necessary, jumping was permissible to get those thicker pieces. If you were walking with another kid, etiquette demanded that you share, taking turns breaking the ice, or taking only one side of a particularly big puddle. STOMP! STOMP! CRUNCH! CRUNCH! CRUNCH!

Break every bit! Tomorrow there'll be more.

Now that I'm a geezer, I have to be very careful on ice. There have been too many falls, and each does more damage. But during Lent, when the world is puddle-crunch wonderful, and conditions for safety allow, you can still catch me going crunch! crunch! crunch!