I have two springtime rituals. 1. I recite, in Olde English, the first 18 lines of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales which I was required to memorize for an English class in my first year of college. “Whanne that April with its shoures …” This is my best party trick and is, unquestionably, the most valuable thing I have retained from my college education.
2. I inflict my magnum opus, Mud Season Romance on as many people as possible. We’ve reached the culmination of our week devoted to maple and mud. Remember how I promised you’d be sick of Mud Season Romance by the end of the week? If you are not ready to move on after this, then your life is permanently stuck in a ditch.
This is also a testament to the early days of home video, when we were all recording way too much footage of ordinary events. Guilty as charged.
It is also a testament to the kind of Dad I was … a Dad willing to share the spotlight with his little nubbers … a Dad willing to let his impressionable young lads sing backup in a song about getting drunk in bars. And now, with no further adieu, is the circa 1987 recording of Mud Season Romance:
Bring on the daffodils! Bluebird alert!
