Things are starting to green and my tulips are pushing their heads up in the flowerbed. Purple crocuses bloomed a couple weeks ago, and when we had a gigantic spring snow storm, they survived being buried under two feet of wet, heavy snow. Many of the trees didn’t fair as well, and the city was strewn with tree carnage, including the large branch that fell on my duplex neighbor’s fence.
The snow has mostly melted, though it’s snow-raining right now. It looks beautiful — from inside under the blanket in bed, where I’m writing and looking out the window at the ducks on the pond and people walking their dogs.
After this difficult, lonely pandemic year, this spring, and the re-greening of the world feels especially magical. People I love are getting vaccinated, and we’ve had a couple days that have been warm enough to sit out on a patio. The first time we went to a brewery patio this spring I felt both strange and euphoric. To sit near strangers and not think that they’re a threat to me, and that I’m not a threat to them. That we can coexist without potentially infecting each other with a deadly virus.
It’s been a full year since we went into lockdown, since we started socially distancing. I can’t remember the last time I was indoors with someone outside of my household without wearing a mask. It’s been both long and not-long, a time both in and out of time. Very little to mark your days, so they end up running into each other. Especially through winter.
But look: yesterday was the first day of spring, and the trees are budding and soon we will have flowers again. Birds are returning to the feeder, and the days are getting noticeably longer. It’s stunning and we all can feel it, even if we’re not in community sharing our joy.
Here’s a spring poem I’ve read over and over. A “green skin / growing over whatever winter did to us.”
Instructions on Not Giving Up – Ada Limón
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
Sam Killmeyer 