On language: early spring (早春) or looking for spring (找春)? and 春天後母面 and Sarah Lincoln

Last week we had such a mild weather tricking us to think spring is around the corner; 早春 (early spring) that it is; Katy thought she saw the tulips are trying to raise her heads above the ground to test the weather, but today was gloomy, rainy, and miserable and snow is on the way tonight.  It may not be 早春 (early spring) but that we still have to 找春 (look for spring).  {早 and 找 have the same pronounciations in Chinese}

We’re still hoping spring is indeed here, it is just 春天後母面, a Taiwanese idiom meaning “sping has a face of a stepmother”, which says the weather in spring is unpredictable and bad weather is not uncommon, just like the temperament of a stepmother.

This is, of course, stereotyping a stepmother.  Lincoln’s stepmother, Sarah (Sally) Bush, was a wonderful mother by all measures.  She brought three of her own children when she married Thomas Lincoln.  She lived to see her step son became the greatest President in the country and survived him four years.  Lincoln’s father would get mad when Lincoln was reading books; he said it was the waste of time in ‘eddication’; it was Sarah Lincoln who came between the boy and the father, and the father listened to the stepmother and let her have her way.  Lincoln once said of her, “All I am, and all I hope to be, I owe to my darling mother!”  After Lincoln became famous she tried to tell what there was between her and young Abe in saying, “His mind and mine, what little I had, seemed to run together.”

When Lincoln was assassinated, the federal agents were sent to Illinois prairie to give Sarah the sad news.  The followings are how Sandburg wrote about the scene.

Out on the Illimois prairie of Coles County they went to a farmhouse and told the news to an old woman.  Quiet and composed she was, the usage of the earth in her. She answered them:

“I knowed when he went away he’d never come back alive.”

This was the stepmother, Sally Lincoln, prepared for the sorrow which came that day.

Lincoln in January 1861

Days before Lincoln left Springfield for Washington, DC for the last time; he went to see his stepmother.  The followings are in Sandburg’s Lincoln: the Prairie Years Volume II.

“Sally Bush and he [Lincoln] put their arms around each other and listened to each other’s heartbeats.  They held hands and talked, they talked without holding hands.  Each looked into eyes thrust back in deep sockets.  She was all of a mother to him. 

He was her boy more than any born to her.  He gave her a photograph of her boy, a hungry picture of him standing and wanting, wanting.  He stroked her face a last time, kissed good-by, and went away.”

(photo taken in 1/1861, about the time when Lincoln said good-bye to his stepmother)