A Chicago spirit always in season

Back in the Middle West again, my sanctuary, my retreat. The circumstances aren’t happy this time — we’ll get to that later. But there is still plenty to appreciate and celebrate here in the heartland. Midwesterners gripe only about the weather and one another. Otherwise, I find them great company.

First, though, you should know that you can never drink the water in Chicago, which explains so many things — Cubs fans, the local politics, the driving. The stuff that comes out of the city taps is pure swill, as if from the bottom of the swimming pool — leaves and all. It reeks of alewives and the gassy bilges of freighters hauling ore.

Instead of tap water, people seem to trend toward the clear liquors, and the brown ones too. They drink a lot here, bless their livers. Bloody marys for breakfast, bloody marys for lunch. If they’re still awake by dinner, they’ll have one then too, what the heck. You don’t get vitamins like that from whisky or the region’s buzzy fluid-du-jour, Old Style beer.

They seem to celebrate every day here, which is good because you never know when a tornado or the next governor’s scandal might wipe you out. Right now, they’re celebrating the arrival of spring, marked by 100 shades of Ireland. Really, you’ve never seen so much green.

At this time of year, even the sidewalks are blanketed with the whirligigs the maple trees drop. Judging from the seeds, there should be a billion soft maples, great orchards from Kenilworth to Kankakee.

Indeed, there almost are. There is so much here — the big yards, which they mow in grids, like ballparks. Great gobs of ducks and geese.

Meanwhile, the songbirds get up early, 5 a.m., sometimes 4, I guess so that they don’t miss anything, particularly in a summer that can last either five months or five minutes. The wrens look up at the enormous, puffy Dolly Parton clouds swelling up out of the north and sing their crazy hearts out, in the staccato cadence and long vowels of the Upper Midwest.

Chicago itself has, of course, seven

seasons, and they sometimes occur in a single day — summer, fall, winter, spring, dread, drought and Armageddon.

I grew up here, and I still tend to like a place where you need to throw on a jacket in the morning, a second one at noon and by dinner there’s been a twister or two.

Yes, there are seven seasons, when many places get by with three or four. That’s another part of the abundance that is Chicago. Seven entire seasons, each more biblical than the last.

By the way, three times I’ve been back to my hometown in the past year — actually, the VIP suburbs surrounding it — and still have yet to spot my first kid playing out-of-doors. The kids, they are gone.

This is a common problem across America, but for some reason it just becomes more apparent in your hometown.

Oh, sure, you see children in the small downtown of my northwest suburb, but I think they might be mannequins. In the subdivisions, you rarely see a single kid, at least not out playing on the expansive lawns the way kids should.

In fact, you rarely see any sign of

them — bicycles in a driveway, a football in

the yard. Evidently, someone has absconded with all the kids. I wish their captors well. Lousy hostages, them.

This time, I’m in Chicago to attend to some sad family business, the final send-off for my beloved Aunt Marji, my father’s sister, for whom I deliver the eulogy in an old church full of Irish uncles. An excerpt:

I remember that twinkle in her eye on opening day. A year ago, I was in town for the Cubs opening day, and I met her and [her husband] Ed at a little tavern down the block from Wrigley. It was rainy and cold — rather splendid as opening days here go, the scent of snow clinging to your nostrils. The three of us never even went to the game. We just sat in the tavern and told stories. It was the best opening day ever.

See, Aunt Marji treated every day like opening day. She was as Chicago as a Mike Royko column, as full of heart as the most fervent Cubs fan. She was this city. She made it better. She made it laugh.

Now she is gone, but not really. Because laughter like hers never goes out of season.

And in heaven, they say, the ice bucket is always full.

chris.erskine@latimes.com