How Sweet It Is To Have the Sun Shine Again!

Today I’m looking out my window (which really needs to be cleaned) at tah, dah, Spring! I can see the first baby leaves on the bushes peeking out of their bark shells, still brown but looking eager. The worn out winter plants, fragile and ready to be cut down to make way for petunias and lavender. Of course, the first wet peek at my good old daffodils and hopefully, the new tulips I planted last year, forty bulbs from Sam’s Club shoveled in in fifteen minutes at five o’clock one evening last fall. Not exactly gourmet gardening. My heart leaps thinking there’s actually going to be hope for green, for summer and bathing suits (not on me, but on leaping brown boys and round baby girls.) My puppy dog and I will be out walking away our winter fat. There will be that best of all of nature’s inventions, the spring morning with a misty chill in the air and the promise of the sun soon coming up warm and cozy. There will be rain, just enough for one more cup of cocoa, and then, that best of all nature’s temperatures, seventy degrees with a breeze. I’ve mentioned this a couple of times before to my husband, who gets all snarley and says it isn’t spring until March 21. Well, I say, sarcastically, hurray for science class! So much for following your instincts. So much for rejoicing in the glories of being alive and the wonders of nature. While no one is going to confuse me with Tarzan, it’s amazing to me how much my psyche swings with the planet. In winter I cook roasts, in spring I plant, in summer I laze, in fall I store up. Give me sunshine and a breeze and all is forgotten. The fact that it’s going to be 110 degrees in July, or that the car is going to slide uncontrollably down the hill towards the stoplight next December, gone from my worry list. My heart follows the appointed high points: snow falling in the light of a street lamp, stomping your boots off on the carpet when you get home. Walking over a snowy stretch of ground and listening to the crunch. Sledding. Parades in the summer. Sticky snow cones and Frisbies. And a fall drive, up a canyon to see the fabulous garden of yellow aspens and red oaks, marveling at finding the first snow. But spring means pink and yellow jelly beans and a bits of mud on your shoes. Spring means washing the salt from your car for the last time. Spring is Imagination Time for gardeners. Spring is the highpoint of the possible seasons. Spring reminds me what a good idea it is to have faith: a great thing to remember at this time of our lives when lots of us have lost our sense of security. Right now when most of us are cutting down to the “bare necessities, the simple bare necessities,” it’s good to remember change is the only thing that remains constant. I feel like I’ve woken from a long sleep when I feel spring coming. It’s like spring is the truth and all the rest is just preparation. I always knew deep inside myself it’s coming was inevitable. Even when, bundled in boots and mittens, I’m surprised by its arrivalSpring is never bad. It may be more or less cold and wet, or too warm, too early, but it’s inevitable.Faith is a leap and the arrival of spring makes sense of it all. Progress is never steady, it always corrects its ups and downs. If happiness were completely dependent on prosperity, there would be no history worth talking about. Looking back would only elicit pitiful sighs of despair. Once you got to fifth grade social studies, you’d just sit down and bawl. Prosperity left Nero dancing in the flames, and the embarrassing knowledge that Marie Antoinette played farmer. The stories we love are the ones about people overcoming adversity. People who made the springtime come in their lives. The satisfaction of having made it through another winter is part of what makes spring so wonderful. Things are a winter-y economically but winter is only what we make of it. George Washington isn’t a hero because he had great picnics every summer, he’s a hero because he survived the winter at Valley Forge and kept his barefoot army alive. We remember the pioneers on the 24th of July for their snowy rescue of the Willey handcart company and for their courage when their grain was eaten by crickets—actually, that was in late spring. Wall Street supposedly is always either in a bear market or a bull market. We just got out of a bull market when everything was charging along. Now we’re in a bear market, hibernating, waiting to see if spring will come. It may not seem like it ever will again, but then again, it would be stupid to snuggle right up to that sleeping pile of fur and fat and assume it won’t.