There is no reality except the one contained within us.
Hermann Hesse


In Toledo, Ohio, spring is a mirage always anticipated but seldom seen. Winter ‘s icy grasp paralyzes the place well into May when one prayed for evening, somewhere near May 31st, the temperature zooms from ten below zero to ninety degrees, with 110% humidity. In March of the year I was teaching Art Appreciation at the university there, winter was beginning to seem eternal. I left for work at six a.m. bundled up in several layers of thermal underwear, three heavy sweaters, fleece lined leggings, an insulated storm coat, two heavy scarves and waterproof mittens over my fleece lined gloves. I wedged myself behind the steering wheel of my Renault and managed to get the engine sufficiently thawed to turn over by seven thirty. If there were no collisions on the highway and luck was with me, I covered the five miles to the school, my bladder bursting and my nerves destroyed, just in time for my three o’clock class.

I sloshed into my classroom where my students were huddled around the heat vent to launch a unit on the painters of the Renaissance. “Good Morning!” I cried. “Today, we will discuss La Primavera.”

The group took their seats, opened their notebooks and looked at me expectantly. “What is La Primavera?” asked Harvey, his voice muffled by scarves and sweaters.

"Our assignment,” I said.

“My question was not about the painting,” he said. “It was about the title. What does it mean?”

“Spring.” I said.

My class looked at me as if I had uttered an obscenity. “What is spring?” asked Mary Pat. “I’ve never seen it.”

“Yes you have,” said Jonathan. “Don’t you remember 1961? It was 50 degrees in April.”

“Was that the year the floods swept away Superior Street?”

I propped a large reproduction of the Botticelli masterpiece on the chalk tray and tapped my desk for attention. “Let us discuss this painting, please,” I said. ““What are the characters doing here?”

My class gazed at the cluster of nymphs, and maidens, ready targets for a naked Cupid. “They are dancing with joy and chasing after one another with pagan lust,” said Laura.

“Obviously, Botticelli has never experienced Midwestern weather,” said Harvey. “None of us have ever seen a season like this. Any fool, who attempts to satisfy his lust in March around here, would be frozen into position until June.”

“That is a coarse way to put it,” I said.

“Truth is truth,” observed Harvey.”

”Nature is doing the best she can,” I said. “It is up to us to encourage her efforts using the power of our minds. If every one of us in this room thought spring, that’s what it would become. Haven’t you ever heard that saying, ‘Nothing’s either good or bad but thinking makes it so’?”

“That’s just what it is,” said Mary Pat, “A saying.“

“Only if you think so,” I said with what I hoped was a wise smile. “If we create a tableau of Botticelli’s painting on the front lawn, we could actually transform the climate around us.”

“Impossible,” said Harvey. “If forced air heat can’t get the temperature up to seventy degrees, our tableau won’t stand a chance.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Mary Pat. “I remember once when I thought I was sure a truck was going to ram right into my car. I closed my eyes and willed it to swerve to the left.”

“And did it?” asked Laura.

Mary Pat nodded. “Yes, it did. It rammed into a little pink Volkswagen trying to pass me on the right.”

Phillip Spitzer was my very favorite student. His was the kind of optimism I thought had gone out of style in the younger generation and every time he answered my questions with his sunny smile and inspiring positive attitude, I understood why I so loved my teaching career. “I’ll bet you fifty bucks that we can create spring out there,” he said to Harvey.

“You’re on,” said Harvey.

We all chose parts in the painting and decided to stage our tableau at our meeting the following day. “I’m going to invite Dean Rochte to see this,” I said. “We will amaze him.”

The next day at three, all of us gathered on the front steps of the Humanities Building, dressed in filmy gowns and stadium boots. “The weather forecast said blizzard conditions,” said Harvey. “I hope you have your fifty dollars ready, Phillip. I don’t accept IOU’s.”

“Positions!” I called and my students assembled into their assigned poses. Kendall waved a tree branch menacingly at the gathering clouds and Mary Pat scattered Burpee seed packets across the frosted lawn. Phillip stood on a statue of William Perry in floral boxer shorts with a bow and arrow in his hand and aimed it at Laura. Laura looked up at him and leered. “You have adorable legs but they are very bristly,” she observed.

“Those are goose bumps,” said Phillip. “Watch out. I am going to shoot!”

His arrow flew through the air and landed in the oak tree at the foot of the steps. As I stared at my group, their teeth chattering and their hair tousled by gusts of wind, the sun pushed aside the gray clouds and burst upon our masterpiece. The air was suffused with sweet floral perfume and the trees seemed to burst into leaf. The dean came hurrying across the lawn unbuttoning his coat. He gazed up at the blazing sun and then at the tableau my students had created and shook his head. “Amazing!” he said. “That’s spring! How did you do it?”

“We used the power of our minds,” I said “Isn’t that what college is for?”

“Look!” exclaimed Laura. “I found a whole cluster of violets!”

“You owe me fifty bucks, Harvey,” said Phillip.

I examined the violets Laura held more closely. There was a tag on it that said, “Grown with love by Feniger’s Flowers.”

Laura’s eyes met mine. “My mom always said that flower shop created miracles,” she said.

“How do you plan to spend that fifty, Phillip?” I asked.

Phillip grinned. “To buy us all hot fudge sundaes!” he said.

“I think I’m in love with you!” I said. “Do you suppose my fancy has turned at last?”

“You’re probably hungry,” said Laura. “It’s almost five.”

“Shall we dance?” said Kendall and he gave me his arm.

“But there’s no music!” said Mary Pat.

“Oh yes there is,” said Phillip. “Listen! That’s Mendelssohn’s Spring Symphony!”

“There’s a robin!” cried Laura. “It really is spring.”

Kendall took me in his arms and I whispered, ”Where did you hide the tape recorder?”

“Behind that dumpster where Laura put the empty florist box.”

I smiled up at him. “You do a mean waltz.”

“That’s because it’s spring,” said Kendal and we whirled across the greening lawn.


Experience is not what happens to a man;
It is what a man does with what happens to him.
Aldous Huxley