March 2006 Archives

By Emily

     To my child self, obsession with Spring was the unfathomable idiosyncrasy of my entire culture. I contemplated with confusion and some distaste the myriad poems about rebirth and daffodils, the innumerable evocations of young buds bursting forth from the death of winter. I waited with impatience while my mother rhapsodized to friends about her multiplying bulbs. What, I wondered, was the big deal? So the plants came back after the winter. So what? Winter couldn’t last forever, could it? I couldn’t fathom why so many people seemed to find the wonders of Spring to be a compelling emotional subject. Enough about the crocus and the dew, thought I. What of the tribulations of human beings?

     The other day it occurred to me that my attitude has changed completely regarding the inspirational potential of Spring. Lately, even with one reason or another for my mind to be heavy, my heart can’t help leaping up when I see trees full of burgeoning buds and smell sweet daphne on the air. Let me pass a lavender rhododendron, unrelated to my life in any obvious way, and immediately I am braver and more hopeful. A tulip tree in flower, and I feel a world of infinite potential is mine for the taking. Why should it be so? Aren’t children supposed to be the ones full of wonder and connection to the world around them?

     Wordsworth wrote that we come into the world “trailing clouds of glory” and that “shades of the prison-house begin to close” around us as we age, until finally, as adults, we can no longer perceive the divine light that once clothed us. Since a child is in some sense a small Spring unto herself, it makes sense she would need the external Spring less than an adult; she holds whithin herself such vivacity that she feels no need for a reminder of life creeping back in green and flowering abundance. The child is young tendrils and new-sprung energy, and can weather the gray blankness of winter without flagging spirits or feeling oppressed by the seeming death that surrounds her. Whereas I, I am oppressed by it.

     But I also think that my newfound appreciation of Spring has to do with a quality that is added to humans as they age, rather than being taken away. As an adult, individual deaths have devastated me with their finality. Even if someone explains it to you, there is no way to comprehend emotionally how, after Grandma dies, you can never talk to her again and see her respond, never be comforted by her or see her adjust her funny elastic waistband pants or sit with her in the bathroom, drinking milk out of an orange cup while she puts those prickly multi-colored curlers in her white hair. With human death, you have to accept that you will never, never get the person back. Well, you do if, like me, you are an agnostic. Even if you really wanted to talk to Grandpa about the war, or record his story about letting the pigs loose on board the steam liner, or tell him how much you liked to sit on his lap and hear his stories of Lulu the flying scottie dog when you were little, it makes no difference once he is dead. Even if the person who died is just some kid you had a crush on in high school, it is eerie and sad that he is never going to add any new things to your life.

     I think that is why Spring has become so incredible to me. If the death of one single person is so absolutely final, how staggering that the whole natural world can seem to lapse into death and then, every March, life shoots forth unstoppably from every crevice and window box, every maple tree and spare lot. Maybe the vernal obsession contains melancholy as well as intoxicating elements, when the glut of regeneration seems a profuse and adamant contradiction to the laws of death that we have learned, but on a grand, impersonal scale that refuses to touch or reverse individual loss. Nevertheless, it is a freedom, a release from the most unbreakable rule. Nevertheless, there is a giddiness, like any time the laws seem to be suspended and we can move about the world without restraint Not only is it regenerated life, but in many cases it’s unwanted life, unlooked-for life, cracking sidewalks and concrete foundations, pushing through fences, snaking along walls, carrying me along. I am buoyed up. I am reckless and sunny. I am swept up in the exuberance of it all, breaking things and making things.

Authored by David