spring can really hang you up the most

In the early 1950’s, pianist and composer Tommy Wolf — not to be confused with the author Thomas Wolfe or the other author Tom Wolfe — met lyricist Fran Landesman in a St. Louis night club. In 1955 they gave us “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most”, which Wikipedia describes as “a jazz rendition of the opening line of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: ‘April is the cruelest month.'”

The song has been recorded by countless artists, some of whom are Barbra Streisand, Bette Midler, Betty Carter, Chaka Kahn, Ella Fitzgerald, Norah Jones, Rickie Lee Jones, Sarah Vaughan, Stan Getz, Stanley Turrentine, Toots Thielemans and, of course, Zoot Sims. My favourite version is by Lucia Micarelli from a melange of scenes from the incomparable HBO series Treme.

I’ve been enjoying several versions of this classic song as I wait out a much-needed, much-appreciated cloudburst. Our dogs Katoo and Tooka are taking sorties outside to bark at the thunder in exchange for treats and a quick toweling off.

The rain is already letting up, but it gave us a good enough soaking to relax a bit about forest fires. Our island is fairly well prepared for the fire season, although some ne’er-do-well(s) tried to tempt fate recently by burning a large pile of trash near our neighbour Lee. We’ve had two close-enough fires in the last few years, one stopped by well-prepared locals and the other spotted by a pilot from the nearby Campbell River airport.

As always, British Columbia is having massive fires this summer, but almost all of them are in the remote northeastern corner of the province, about 1300 kilometres (800 miles) away.

UPDATE: The clouds have passed, leaving us with 8 mm (a third of an inch) of the wet stuff, enough to settle some dust, but not enough to reinvigorate our micro-hydro system. Fortunately, the sun is back at it, bumping up our solar intake. It’s been touch and go the last few days with our system because we’re working without a net. More accurately, our back-up generator is down until our good neighbour Harris replaces its voltage regulator tomorrow.