Unabashed Forsythia... and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad April Fools Day of a Central Pennsylvania Youth

On this blue-sky first-of-April morning, I stand at the kitchen window, gazing across a gradually greening backyard, admiring a swath of decades-old forsythia fairly bursting with sunshine-yellow flowers on shoots of gray-brown bark. Ah, Forsythia: brazen harbinger of spring, native to far eastern China and southeastern Europe, named for eighteenth-century Scottish horticulturalist William Forsyth. The turn of the calendar and the garden's unabashed splash of color transport me to a long-ago April Fools' Day in Central Pennsylvania and to another forsythia bush that bloomed by our house on Grantham Road....

It was a pranky plan conceived by Big Sister—me— in the comfortable depths of our wood-paneled rec room. In the finest creative, corrupting tradition of Big Sisters, I enlisted the help of adorable, adoring Little Sister Debbie to join me in its execution. Full of April Foolery, running on skinny little legs, waving skinny little arms, we barreled out the back door, across the carport, around the corner of the house to where Dad was diligently edging the forsythia bed. “Dad! Dad! Mom just fell down the steps!” we shouted breathlessly. This was patently not true. Our Mother was ensconced in our late-1960s Central Pennsylvania kitchen, unwittingly preparing a late-1960s Central Pennsylvania lunch: probably pimiento and olive loaf sandwiches, or peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwiches, served in all likelihood with canned Del Monte Fruit Cocktail and Campbell’s Bean with Bacon Soup.

Now, the Victorian language of flowers tells us that forsythia signifies anticipation—and indeed, in that moment, a great sense of domestic anticipation hung in the early spring air. Wait for it... Dad blanching, dropping his shovel, bolting toward the house. Wait for it... Little Sister Debbie and I, jumping up and down in the golden glow of forsythia and April foolery, exclaiming in unison, “APRIL FOOL! APRIL FOOL! APRIL FOOL!” Wait for it... Dad wheeling around, storming toward us and, with jaw set and blue eyes a-blazin’, informing us in the strongest terms available to a late-1960s Central Pennsylvania Dad that whimsical fabrications proclaiming a tumble by one’s mother IS NEITHER AN AMUSING NOR AN APPROPRIATE APRIL FOOLS’ JOKE.

The calendar turns and turns and turns; I gaze out the kitchen window. As this brief recollection from my Central Pennsylvania childhood illustrates, I am not much of a prank planner: I was and always will be a woeful April Fooler. And as much as I've marveled at the brightness, the cheerfulness, the sheer welcome spring-ness of forsythia through the years, I always look forward to more nuanced, more thoughtful, more subtle garden color yet to come. 

Forsythia is pure joy. There is not an ounce, not a glimmer of sadness or even knowledge in forsythia. Pure, undiluted, untouched joy.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh