Spring's Promise
I have a love affair with spring. It's been going on as long as I can remember and, like all true loves, it never fades. The first crocus that pushes through the ground may be covered again with snow, but it will not be denied, any more than the opening daffodil. Growing up in Syracuse, where winter had to be coaxed if not pushed into giving way, I can still recall the first day I could throw a baseball with friends on grass that had just given up its last ribbons of white. It was only 50 degrees - a temperature today that still has me in my heavy wool sweater and a jacket - but it was shirtsleeves time.
I've always associated spring with possibility. Whatever failures in last year's garden plagued me, spring would bring the hope for redemption, the invitation to try again. If my bed of black-eyed susans had overtaken the garden path because I planted too many and not trusted their genetic desire to take over more real estate, I could thin it in fall, replant some elsewhere, and know that spring would give me the chance, once again, to get it right. I've found this a fitting metaphor for my life as well. Waiting for spring to correct past mistakes is never justified, but the earth gives us lessons if we are open to its teaching.
I love the sensory overload of spring. Its varying shades of green remind me of an Irish countryside, and the white wispy trails of Bradford Pears shedding their flowers fill a windy day with spring's own gentle dry rain. The scent of hyacinths always has me bending as if in prayer, just as the opening red tulips draw my eye to their yellow centers. Spring's warming days, with its life-giving rains, bring forth the smell of thawing earth, new-grown grass, and before long the Korean spice bush. Shredded mulch offers its brown-textured protection to contrast with whatever it surrounds - and promises to decay in time to replenish the soil it covers like a baby blanket.
Of course I know that spring's pleasures would not exist without winter, both literally and figuratively. New life cannot bless us without old life giving way, an appreciation that puts my own aging in perspective and makes it more tolerable. Each season has its charms and purpose.
What I love best about spring, I suppose, is that it allows me once again to plunge my hands into the soil. I get to put in a few annuals, and perhaps a new perennial, to cover and water them, and to know that I have added a touch of beauty to the world that has so rewarded me. I am no master gardener, to be sure, and my own garden plot is humble both in its design and caretaker. But the earth just asks for respect, not perfection.
This yearly ritual also connects me to my past. My ancestors grew food to sustain their families in Eastern Europe. My mother was in the garden every spring and no doubt instilled this love of the soil in me with every plant I saw her put in the ground. With modern technology, our work-filled lives, and the tendency among so many to trade large gardens for larger houses, we can lose this connection with the soil and, through it, with generations past and to come. Wendell Berry captured, for me, this power of spring in his poem, The Current:
"Having once put his hand into the ground,
seeding there what he hopes will outlast him,
a man has made a marriage with his place,
and if he leaves it his flesh will ache to go back.
...............................
The current flowing to him through the earth
flows past him, and he sees one descended from him,
a young man who has reached into the ground,
his hand held in the dark as by a hand."
Like all things I deeply love, spring repays me with its graces and gratitude. It will, I know, give way to summer's heat. But it will also, as all that I love, last in my memory and heart long after it fades.
Photo Credit: Carol Donsky Newell
