Spring

Tis Sunday night and the fire is waning. The soft glow of the coals indicates that it was an early fire. The day had a comfortable feel to it, right to the end. For most of the day, the sun was bright in a cloudless sky as the day marched to the vernal equinox despite our human wanting of an early spring. There're only a few days to go, and most of us can wait.

Spring is one of those pleasurable seasons. It doesn’t have the sharp vehemence of Winter, nor the lazy, hazy days of Summer. What it has, and always has, is expectation. The arrival of seasonal warmth engenders creation: flowers, birth, greenery and aroma. Winter is cruel in its suppression of scent. You can smell the cold, but that’s about it unless a neighbor has a wood-fire going and the wind is in the right direction, and then and only then, does winter lose its bite for a singular moment in time.

I wonder what is it about the approach of spring that makes us feel anxious and wanting?

In many ways I think it is an atavistic feeling that wells up from our DNA and says with a sigh, “we survived, we made it thus far through the darkness and cold.” There is always a “but” in there, just in case, there is a March blizzard or some other meteorological calamity. “But” we made it.

I think all of us can feel the stirrings of the earth. We may not be able to identify the rumblings consciously, but we feel it. We feel something, the buds below the bark, the squeezing of chlorophyll into the blades of grass and tree sap ready to explode into a canopy of green. That’s probably where the poet and the lyricist get the feelings and the songs of “spring fever.”

I know I’m a bit early, but that’s me. I never could wait for Spring.