Spring came on forever

The boys came home on Friday and immediately entrenched themselves in the bedroom with my computer.  For the past nine months, the four of us have lived in a two bedroom townhouse.  Sue and I converted the dining room into a third bedroom, where we sleep, so that the boys could each have their own room.  The lack of privacy has worn on us, but we prefer it to the certain conflicts arising from two fourteen year-old boys living and sleeping shoulder to shoulder.

With both boys crammed into one small room for the weekend -- sprawled across the bed with their laptops -- the atmosphere did not seem conducive to reflection.  Neither figuratively nor literally:  the room developed a distinct odor through the weekend.  If I could have opened a window, that would have freshened things a bit.  However, this year, it seems that spring has come on forever.

I read the phrase, "Spring came on forever" in Shelby Foote's history of the American Civil War, where he uses it in reference to the spring of 1864.  I googled the phrase now, and I discovered that Bess Streeter Aldrich used it as the title of her 1935 novel.  She, in turn, took it from a line of a poem by Vachel Lindsay.  The first line of Bess Aldrich's novel (found on-line with the Gutenberg project) reads:

"Matthias Meier was twenty-one in that year of 1866, tall and stalwart of form, with only a healed red furrow across his upper left arm to show for the last day's fighting of his Illinois regiment."

There's the Civil War connection, I assume.

In my case, I refer to the slow pace of spring.  Temperatures have not risen above zero since the middle of last week, and the early flood of songbirds has slowed to a trickle.  I saw the ravens, yesterday, soaring around the smokestack at the university, and I watched a pidgeon collecting twigs on Saturday.  Otherwise, everyone and everything has paused awaiting some warmer weather.  The forecast promises temperatures in the low teens by mid-week.  I can't wait to bring some air into this place.