Spring could be my favourite season. There are not many to choose from, I suppose. Winter really places dead last, I’m sorry. Neither my recent Albertan history nor my initial Manitoban history did anything towards a fondness for winter. There are cold parts to me dating back to winters in the 70s.

My birthday is in spring on the fifth of May in 1970, a day after the dubious Nixon-era shootings at Kent State in Ohio. I also share my birthday with Karl Marx. This kind of prompts me neither towards conservatism nor communism. Springtime growing up on a farm has things like new baby chicks, new kittens, and growth in the garden. It means I will eventually be eating berries and vegetables. I can particularly remember radishes. I developed a taste for them because it was the first vegetable that sprouted and matured enough to pull up and eat.

Back then, kids were rude enough in a small town to simply hit someone’s garden to eat carrots, peas, berries, or apples. I don’t know how easy any of that would be now. It was a part of spring to look forward to gardens and eating really fresh vegetables. As part of city living, Keri and I have become regular farmer’s market shoppers. The old familiarity with garden or greenhouse produce is a direction that dates back to what I enjoyed as a kid having the benefits of a garden or picking wild berries which I don’t have available to me as I did then.

Greenery is something that begins in spring. There is tough greenery like evergreens, but the multi-layered tones come forward with spring – mixed streaks and splotches going towards something more. Spring comes up with the budding greenness reaching towards the light of the sun, the days when you smell the life around you, new and changing.

I will be walking through the neighbourhood and I will appreciate the gardens, but I won’t go in them. Of course things will look good out there but Keri and I go grocery shopping like adults. I would like to think there is some place a kid can enjoy a neighbour’s garden without a lot of hassle.

Reinhardt lives in Boyle Street with his wife, Keri Breckenridge.