Bumbershoots

I regard the coming of spring or fall as similar to getting over a bad cold. There’s no great trumpet-blared moment marking the border between the extreme and the moderate seasons; you just realize one day that you don’t notice those old symptoms any more, and haven’t for a while and, by golly, you must have finished and moved on.

They’re telling me it’s spring, but I am withholding judgement for now. There have been numerous springlike days over the past four or five weeks, followed by falls of snow or “better get my hat on” winds. This is no reason not to observe the date, however, and therefore, I have decided to move into spring by studying umbrellas on postcards. Rain and umbrellas seem a natural part of spring in my region of the world, even though in this particular region, the easiest way to understand spring has come is to observe how many blow-n-part umbrellas have been jammed into trash cans along the street.

On postcards, as in popular music, rain is generally seen as a bad thing. For every “Kiss Me in the Rain” or “You and Me and Rain on the roof”, there are a dozen “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head” and “Don’t Let the Rain Come Down.” Childhood strains of “Rain, Rain, Go Away” echo through music and postcard reflections. Hence, of course, the umbrellas.

And yet, our postcard artists also like to point out that rain gives an excuse for umbrellas, and umbrellas give excuses for two unmarried people to huddle under an umbrella, as seen above. I suppose I should not have included a sun umbrella in this discussion, as we all know It Never Rains in Southern California. (Though we DO know about the rain down in Africa, and that the rain in Spain stays mainly…okay, I’ll stop now.)

Even leaving out sun umbrellas and parasols, though, there is considerable evidence that our ancestors regarded the umbrella as a convenient excuse…even without bad weather.

If you get an umbrella that’s big enough, in fact, you may not notice the weather at all.

I don’t see a whole lot of rain here, either. They may be from my part of the world, and know that just because it’s not raining now is no guide to what the weather may be in five minutes.