Although the official start of Spring is still weeks away, the shift to Daylight Savings Time always heralds the change of seasons for me. This year, due to mild temperatures and generous rainfall, trees and shrubs are already budding, and bulbs are beginning to blossom. I am not ready to claim the end of Winter. Where I live, March can be a trickster even if Punxsutawney Phil never glimpsed his shadow.
As I write this it is blustery outside, dead leaves and Winter’s debris are scuttling down the street in a hurry to get somewhere. Fine with me, their glory is in the past; a new crop is waiting on just a few mild days before declaring themselves. I know every surface will be covered with pollen soon—Spring’s bounty from the tall pines that surround us as we transition from the barrage of needles and pine cones that have fallen like grenades on the roof and the lawn for the past six months. Thankfully we are spared the falling limbs that marked a particularly bad storm late last year.
There is something about early Spring and late Fall sun. Walking from cool shadows into its bright and warm embrace is healing, there is no better way to say it. It’s not quite a renewal but as close as we are likely to come to that feeling. Most of all, Spring is a time of possibility. I can feel its quickening, a promise of sun risings into pale rose, lilac and orange glow and later fading flames of orange, rose and magenta at dusk. The days are wrapped like presents each one a gift to be opened and savored.
Spring days can never be too long for me. I want them to linger, take their sweet time before strolling into Summer’s heat. Summer here is languid, too hot at times to do anything but sit and sip a cold beverage—gaze at the shore or watch the birds and butterflies, bees and dragonflies go about their business. But Spring, now that is a busy time. There is so much to be done, new plantings—herbs and a few veggies perhaps this year having let the beds go fallow for a while to renew themselves. Windows need to be rid of the filmy darkness of Winter, walkways restored and errant patches of grass removed that found their way into the beds and between the patio bricks
I don’t mind the work, it is a pleasure to invest in the renewal. It reminds me that in the midst of Winter’s darkness, through storms, winds, and gloomy days there remains hope—the kind of hope that only Spring heralds. I can only imagine what it might have been like to celebrate that rebirth when the promise of Spring was not taken for granted, when people literally danced for joy at the first signs of its arrival. That is the power of hope, of waiting on nature to fulfill its pledge, to give its gift of life rekindled.
There is a part of me that wonders if we wouldn’t be better off if we still felt that wonder, that profound and grateful sense of life springing anew. Perhaps we would be less inclined to treat the days with casual indifference, and more likely to treasure each moment we are given. I’ll admit that as a young man I could not easily relate to the poetry of Keats, Tennyson or Wordsworth. Romance and rapture, at least of the kind they wrote and apparently experienced was alien to me--my life as yet unlived to the fullest and unburdened by age. With the passing of the years, though, I've found myself revisiting their words and what seemed light and airy, a world viewed through tinted glass has become a more palpable reality. It is after all only when our souls soar, when we have loved and lost and loved again that we know deeply within us what it means to be reborn.
Comments