Spring Is Delayed

The Season Has Been Rescheduled

Spring is delayed here in New England. We are trapped beneath a canopy of winter grayness and everything is wet. Elsewhere people are facing tornadoes and typhoons. For what it is worth, I’ll send my empathy tendrils through the TV. I will watch the videos and say, “how awful”, but that won’t stop me from mumbling my local complaints.

And its not that bad, really. The snow is gone. There is a new fuzzy greenness to most of the ground. The trees are edging, their flowers just about to bust. They are waiting for one warm day with sun. When it comes they will blow the pollen index into the stratosphere.

The crocuses made a brief appearance. A disappointing one. Even shorter and less eventful than the snowdrops. Despite their truncated display, they gave me great joy. They always do, for I remember them.

I have a memory… and when you get older memories are like dreams… of walking around the side of our house in Hastings-on-Hudson and seeing crocuses pushing up through the ground at the edge of some myrtle. I could say that the ground was spongy, the day was warm and then describe the smells, but I would be making it all up. Instead, it is all of that… this one Vaseline smeared memory… and when I really remember it… when I can access the straight dope… it floods through me and I am transported back in time to my most treasured experience of the best loved season. I try not to think of it too often. Writing about it will probably make it even more remote. Thinking can’t access it. Instead, I have to look for it. I do every year. I creep around my house… a house that is two “hardiness zones” removed form the memory’s nursery… in the early spring, walking like a child who often tried to walk like an “indian”. I peer around corners and under bushes. I push aside pine needles and life up rocks. Sometimes I use a rake when I am searching for triggers. Looking and waiting for some purple petals to take me to places that exist only on the slipping edges of my memory.

I’m not sure why I try so hard. It’s not like my childhood was a bonanza of happy fun time. Why am I so intoxicated by the past? Nostalgia is a depressive drug, isn’t it?

Maybe so, but part of the pit that it puts in your chest comes from the knowledge that you were once a child. That there was a time when all things were new. Once you could put names to them they became yours. You could hold on to them, their time, and the feelings that surrounded them. Crocus. Spring. They were there. They are here. Again.

The weather report says that today is going to be warm and dry. No sun. We live in a cartoon of Seattle now. New England is now the gray part of the country. Warm and dry? I’ll take it. In the forty percent morning light the forsythia’s yellow explosion is inviting. Maybe I’ll climb under that bush today and try to remember playing with a matchbox VW bug under a sister bush forty-five years ago.