Writing Prompt – Spring – Janice Strohmeier

Spring comes to us all. It seems we just blink after putting up our Christmas cards and holiday decorations, and the buds are bursting forth outside. Spring comes to us in a tireless and predictable manner.

We expect it.

We need it

We wait for it

We thank it.

Because once it gets here, we are assured that the dark, cold days are behind us.

Why do we look to Spring for a fresh start on things? Could this be the natural “new” year, the time that we should make our resolutions rather than those we make arbitrarily in January? Does nature herself dictate that we start anew? Is it sheer force of nature that nudges us into new beginnings? As summer warms into full growth do we lament Spring’s passing of opportunities lost?

Write about a time when Spring opened a new road, a new world, a new start for you.
Write about a time when you missed an opportunity to start anew.
Write about your favorite Spring memory.

Get your senses into it. Write about:

The smells of spring
The sights of spring
The sounds of spring
The touch of spring
The tastes of spring

Think about all the ways we use the word “spring” in our vocabulary. Look at the list below and see how many other ways you have thought about the word “spring.” Write about one of these expressions or offer a completely different one. See what comes up as you write, or discover your own usages of the expressions:

spring break
spring fever
spring cleaning
spring into action
a spring in your step
spring a leak
spring chicken
spring forth

Finish a story starter:

It was Spring again, at last.
I watched Spring slip past my window; winter wasn’t ready to let go.

Comments (2)

Janice Strohmeier

February 25, 2025

Spring Fever
My date was coming at six o’clock.
I had dumped Dan, my high school boyfriend, after graduation a few months earlier. He was a stick in the mud. Dan’s post-graduation ambition was to carry on his father’s rural construction business, buy a house, and settle down in a smaller town just north of our already small hometown. I was having none of that. I was eighteen, and Dan had one more year of high school to complete before he could carry on with his grand future. I thought it was a perfect time to break up with him. Besides, I had a real job.
And that’s where I met Keith.
The job was at a well log data-processing company, and although I knew nothing about oil wells, logs, or data-processing, this was back in the day of OJT (on-the-job-training) and anybody could get a job almost anywhere as long as they were “willing to learn.”
While I earned my salary tracing oil-well depth readings on paper logs, Keith earned his pay as a computer operator. He looked so intellectual reading long, folded sheets of line-printer pages. As he took notes and checked the readings, he would dash between huge computer main-frames loading tapes and hard drives.
As the Canadian spring promised us that summer was coming, we moved the “lunch room” from the dreary basement of the three-story building to the picnic tables in the back parking-lot, and in short-sleeves, we enjoyed the early spring sunshine. We ate potato chips and takeout pizza. Keith’s lunch was often a homemade sandwich and a piece of fruit.
We smoked cigarettes and drank coffee. Keith always drank water, and refused our offers of cigarettes. He said he never touched them. While we giggled about our latest keg-party or raucous weekend escapade, Keith talked about his weekends working on the family farm in a neighboring community. He was tall and broad, large hands and strapping shoulders. I imagined that he was accustomed to lifting bales of hay and roping cows.
I don’t remember exactly how it came about that Keith asked me out to dinner but when he did, he asked me if I would like to have my head spin over dinner and I said yes and he said good because he had made reservations at the revolving restaurant at the top of the city’s then-tallest building, The Husky Tower. My head was already spinning without even going to the city’s most exclusive restaurant. An older man asked me out. A handsome older man. Asked me out to a grown-up restaurant. I suddenly felt so much older than eighteen. And a long way from high-school.
Keith was twenty-three.
**
Spring is lovely in the mountains. The earthy breeze of the prairie grasses carry the sweet fragrance of mountain blooms. For the first few days of spring, the air smells like a fresh rain has brushed by and scrubbed the last layer of winter drudgery off the colorless landscape. The air is filled with the scent of green promise.
Our dinner date fell on a fresh spring day and I stressed that whole afternoon over what I would wear, what I could do with my hair, and what I would do about make-up. I had none of those skills in my arsenal. I had always been a tomboy. My older sister who was nothing but frills, jumped in and took control of the situation. Fluffing my short cropped hair, finding earrings to match my clothes, and trying to navigate blue eyeshadow around my bushy eyebrows.
As the afternoon wore on, my unease morphed from anxiety, to dead panic, until dread draped itself all over me. What’s with this pantsuit? For God’s sake, I should be wearing a dress. The closest thing I had to a dress was a flannel nightgown hanging on the back of my bedroom door. I pleaded with my sister do something but she just clucked at my anxiety as she tried to frill me up with a few scarves and belts. Instead of feeling like a sophisticated woman going out with an older man on a very classy date, I felt like a clown ready to get shot out of a canon at the circus. I carried on in my date-preparation dread, while my sister continued to offer suggestions and reassurance. When my sister was sure she was finished with my make-over, and proud of her results, she turned me toward the mirror.
I was sure I looked like the wrestler, Killer Kowalski with a bit of blue eye shadow.
While I was breaking into a frantic sweat on my upper lip and my armpits, our poodle, Tara, caught a scent at the door and trotted outside, but being dismayed over my reflection was nothing compared to the dread I felt when the dog came back in the house.
As Tara trotted in, she stood in front of us and happily shook her coat of tight curls. It didn’t take a second to realize two things: 1) this dog was covered in fish skeletons, eyes, fins, and scales, and 2) she smelled putrid. The stench was so repulsive that we had to put towels over our noses to breathe. Keith was coming to pick me up for our very sophisticated date, and our house was an olfactory chamber-of-horrors.
At almost the same moment I realized that Keith would be walking into a stink-bomb, the doorbell rang. Tara, in all her canine glory, ran up to the door shimmying her newly-attached fishy body-parts. I squealed in embarrassed horror and headed for the bathroom.
My sister took a playful, but mean turn as sisters are capable of doing, and relished in my discomfort. Knowing this couldn’t end well, she called out in an annoying sing-song chant, “Jan, your date is here,” and dashed down the hallway to her bedroom.
My hair hadn’t been styled, I wasn’t comfortable with blue eyeshadow because in this whole awkward process, and I had changed my mind yet again, and chosen a green pantsuit. My sister had wrapped a belt around my waist and draped two scarves over my shoulders. I looked like a confused gypsy. And the source of the stench was standing at the door wagging her tail and ready to greet my date.
I was somewhere between wanting to die and wishing I were already dead.
The front door was open, so I was out of hiding places; Keith was looking straight at me through the lattice work on the screen door. He was smiling through the top of the cursive “D,” the first letter of our family name. On what felt like steel stumps, my legs dragged me to the door, and I let him in.
Keith walked through the door smiling, but before he could say anything, his expression changed. He looked down at Tara, now doing circles around his feet.
“Oh,” he nodded as though agreeing with an unspoken thought. “Smells like she found some fish fertilizer.” He slapped his hand over his mouth and nose. His voice was muffled behind his hand, but he was enthusiastic, “Everybody is putting it out this time of year. The remains are good for the shrubs.”
Everybody? This is the first I had heard of it.
“You have tomato juice?” he asked as though we kept cases of it in the house.
My mouth hung open as I shook my head from side to side. I thought he wanted a Bloody Mary. I frowned a bit, wondering if we had vodka.
“Neutralizer.” He responded. “You bathe them in it. Happens all the time to our animals on the farm when the skunks spray them .”
I blinked at him.
“I saw a grocery store back up the road a bit,” he offered. “I’ll go get some.” I watched him as he trotted away from me down the walk. Tara jumped up on the door and watched him as he got into his car.
“Well, there goes that,” I mourned as I tried to shoo Tara away. She wagged her fishy-self at me.
Keith came back a few minutes later. He handed me several forty-eight-ounce cans of tomato juice. He took off his sport coat, and amid orders to fill the bathtub with cool water and to open the cans of tomato juice, he rolled up his sleeves, and scooped Tara up in his arms. It didn’t seem to matter to him that his shirt would stink of fish scales and bones.
And it didn’t matter later that my blue eye shadow didn’t match my green pantsuit.

Dillon

April 15, 2025

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