What Robert Frost is Telling Me About this Fine Day. (If the weather doesn't change)

Celebrating ReWindsday with one of my favorite, sad evocations of springtime. WRITTEN AND ILLUSTRATED BY PETER MOORE

MY NIECE GRADUATED from the University of Rochester a couple of years ago. We were on hand for the festivities, so we heard the word “Meliora” about a thousand times. It’s Latin for “ever better”—the university’s exhausting and intimidating motto.

Ever Better? Really?

These kids had finished four years of covid-deranged study. Couldn’t they take a break from relentless self-improvement, and just breathe for a minute?

Nature wasn’t letting them off the hook either, as everything was in bud and flower, growing more meliora by the minute. Certain fortunate 22-year olds (like my niece) are indeed irrepressible shoots ready to burst forth into the most productive time of their lives.

But as I looked on on the quadrangle at U of R, the poet Robert Frost was whispering in my ear, as he often does in spring.

My dad was a great memorizer of poems, erupting with them when the circumstances called for pointed versification. Once, when we were driving out west on vacation, and young Peter was complaining ever so gently about the prospect of driving another seven hours toward the Grand Canyon—we’d left Connecticut three days and 2,500 miles earlier, so it wasn’t that unreasonable!—he glanced over his shoulder and corrected me as only he could—with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Psalm of Life:

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,

   Life is but an empty dream!

For the soul is dead that slumbers,

   And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!

   And the grave is not its goal;

Dust thou art, to dust returnest,

   Was not spoken of the soul.

Fair point, Dad! Grand Canyon here we come—eventually!

Soon I began memorizing scraps of poetry myself. There was room for Robert Frost in my pea brain. The bard of New England wrote some very short poems, including ones that come in handy, say, when you’re looking out over a football field containing 3,000 college graduates surrounded by blooming magnolias.

This poem, for instance:

Nothing Gold Can Stay

OK, that is a little depressing—especially during this green and golden time of the year, when blossoms and mortarboards are everywhere.

But hey, there are other nice colors aside from gold, right?

“In the Spring, I have counted 136 different kinds of weather inside of 24 hours.” —Mark Twain

That’s nuthin’, Mark. In Colorado the weather forecast changes before the weather-person is finished speaking on the nightly news. In our state, The Weather Underground posts

next to their predictions.

How is it where you live?

Looking to find more great newsletters, where you (probably) found this one? Click this link! You get cool things to read, I get cold hard cash from the guy who runs the Refind.com. Everybody wins!

Many thanks for waiting for me here while I plow spring snow off of the Road2Elsewhere.