Pussywillows, Cattails

I can't speak for anyone else, but my memory is stuffed with odd scraps of songs, poems, "wise" adages, quotes from the famous and not-so-famous and (surprisingly!) long passages from favorite books. One of these is the refrain from Gordon Lightfoot's "Pussywillows, Cattails":

Pussywillows, cattails, soft winds and roses

Which is a lovely phrase, evoking various stages of spring after a long cold winter, but, besides the tune, it's all I can remember.

One of the really nice things about being connected to the internet is how easy it can be to find things like words to songs. I just typed in "Gordon Lightfoot" and went from his bio to a list of his songs to the songs themselves

And what did I find? The song is like an exercise in Freud' s free association technique, where one phrase evokes another and that evokes a third and so on and so on. Since no one's mind works exactly like another's, Lightfoot's patterns are different from mine. No wonder I couldn't follow it.

Given that spring has finally arrived to stay, and that is an event worth celebrating, here's the opening and closing stanza:

Pussy willows, cattails, soft winds and roses

Rainpools in the woodland, water to my knees

Shivering, quivering, the warm breath of spring

Pussy willows, cat tails, soft winds and roses