Perpetual Spring

Spring ordinarily is death’s antithesis, as surely as it is winter’s.

At the end of our family’s harshest winter, my dying husband’s heart improbably would not let go of us. It refused to take its last beats until, at least by the calendar, winter had at last elided into the season of growing green that he had always tended to.

Just four days later, the snow had melted entirely away. That afternoon, in a sun-soaked Spring service at her school, one of our daughters read “A Man,” written by poet Louis Untermeyer after his father’s death: “I thought of you…. / And it was like a great wind blowing / Over confused and poisonous places. / It was like sterile spaces / Crowded with birds and grasses, soaked clear through / With sunlight, quiet and vast and clean. / And it was forests growing, / And it was black things turning green.”

One of her brothers read Amy Gerstler’s “In Perpetual Spring,” which ends with an expression of “the faith that for every hurt / there is a leaf to cure it.”  

Spring was my husband’s season–although all seasons were, in their way and his. He would rotate his birdfeeders’ weekly specials to accommodate anticipated guests, and make sure our porch was off limits to humans when robins began building their nests in a favorite corner of the 1805 ornamental molding atop its pillars.

The fruit trees he had planted would begin to bloom. His vegetables and fruits would soon make their way into the world. Armored khaki orbs of quince would drink in April showers and grow so heavy that they bowed the thick branches which hosted them. At their greatest girth, they often settled together on the ground, still attached at their stems to their sturdy trees. They congregated there like meditating buddhas, to be sniffed at by our perplexed beagles. Sour bruised blue-black grapes and fuzzed raspberries and peaches would cluster.

In true winter I would survey once colorful leaves entombed under ice, and headless bush branches and empty trees and abandoned robins’ nests. I would be certain none of them could be brought to life again, to bear peaches and sour apples and cartoonishly colorful hydrangea and rhododendrons. But in Spring they somehow still do.

Even that Spring.

Since that singular March day twelve years ago, true Spring arrives for me not on the designated calendar date, but whenever I spot the first fully-bloomed flower. In New England, that has invariably been a crocus.

I picture it gingerly poking its way through richly layered leaves glossy with melting snow, as if doubting whether it truly is time to be visible and vulnerable. But once it peeks out above the dense autumn detritus, its lavender or buttered white soup-ladle petals relax, and it theatrically basks in the sun. A Fantasia character come to life, for as long as the light lasts.

Spring came a few days early this year.

Blurred Lines

IMG_5472

Winter has been a blur of white and glittering gray, and the line between seasons has imperceptibly been crossed.

Driving overnight rain plumped dessicated berries, turning garnet into cherry red.  The sun erupted this morning, transforming the last raindrops into blurred streaks and dots of cottony white.

A single burst of butterscotch and lavender crocuses in my neighborhood has people lumbering like zombies to stand and dot the salt-cracked street pavement.  They stare silently, not quite believing their bleary eyes.

A flash of brilliant color has supplanted the monochromatic blurs which drew our gazes in winter: ashy sea smoke at dawn, stalwart birds’ wings gliding among bare black branches, the seamlessly spinning vortex of snow.

Black and White: Part 1

saltsidewalk

Although I’ve not yet finished my rambles in the rainbow garden, I’ve been invited by Allan at Ohm, Sweet Ohm to take a break and try my hand at black and white.

Black and white seems particularly apt for the season.  Formerly bountiful, colorful branches have been stripped bare to black.  Vistas first cushioned in soft snow white are suffused with bleak gray, sharpened by menacingly icy shards.

Gray almost always predominates when color is swept away–as it does here on a rock salt- mottled road that had steeped for nearly a season under detritus deposited by heroically-named blizzards.

The roads are so much more interesting now that they’ve eroded into colorless abstract art.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Family

HPIM9086

Three years ago.

The crest of a hill down to a frozen pond that was part of the family home and land Jim nurtured.  At the left is one of three antique blue-green sheds which were settled on a slope in closely descending order of size (somewhat like the three children we had when we moved in).

The sturdy out-buildings were filled with the detritus of family life: outdoor games; sports equipment, including the soccer nets Jim built with the boys; the red tractor that appeared one day on a flatbed truck (“Um, I don’t remember ordering a tractor” I said to the delivery man who was asking for a check.  Jim forgot to mention the acquisition.).

An entire section of the largest shed was devoted to winter, including ice-skating and hockey equipment for those rare, perfect days when the pond would freeze glassy and smooth and a flash of gliding fish underneath the thick ice would thrill us.

It was the home where our children spent most of their school years, and the home where Jim died.

Three years ago, three generations of our family gathered on the hill, covered with a good foot-and-a-half of fresh snow.    Smaller cousins (and one of their moms) bore animal-shaped knitted mittens.  Jim trudged out with folding chairs so his parents could watch their children and grandchildren.  Older children took charge of younger ones.  The non-risk-averse built jumps and sailed over them, thunking upside-down in the snow in a spray of ice-blue nuggets and laughing to break the blanketing winter silence.

HPIM8941

Many of us knew in a way that it would be the last time Jim was well enough even for such an outing at home.  

I’m certain Jim didn’t think of it that way, as he enjoyed every minute outside with his family.

HPIM8953

%d bloggers like this: