The Harbingers of Spring

The Harbingers of Spring is fiction and is a tale of hope set in the surroundings of the author's grandfather's farm in Brown County, Indiana, of memories from the first decades of his life, born of childhood loneliness, amid things he would do if he had the choice to get people to come and visit. This book follows decades of the development of a festival in the Sweetwater Creek valley. It is a presentation of equality and diversity that follows a girl and boy in their pursuit of forbidden love. It presents a global input into a microcosm while the harbingers of spring, from the constellations to the flowers to the wildlife, to annual happenings, mark the growth and education of the two main characters.This education is punctuated by the genetic development of a grand champion bull and a bloodline of prized cattle and the production of mules. A world court is depicted that hears cases of the lovelorn, annually, and gives opinions up to and including the provision of weddings. The book depicts the conversations of all introduced characters from wherever to the constants of the rural setting: the rules of bathing on the porch in a washtub and spitting on one's finger to entice the butterflies and making a bed of two pairs of pants for lovemaking. The story expands out of harsh fundamentalism, the ugliness of the gangs of Great Britain, the old assertion that behind every great fortune lies a crime (Balzac 1834), the drug cartels, and the systematic destruction in the prisoner of war camps. Love does triumph. The driving force of the girl protagonist is the belief that if you have been denied of your own dreams, you should do whatever you can to help others not be denied their dreams.The Harbingers of Spring is a retelling of stories made up by the author to maintain interest by his wife in fighting leukemia, born of desperation--an effort to entice her to want to hang on, just to hear one more story, and a plea for her to continue to live.

-- David Roller