This may be one of the first springs where I feel a twinge of melancholy at its ending. For most of the half-century of my life, I’ve only ever celebrated the end of spring, as it signals the official start of summer, and who could be mad about that? This time around I feel a certain sadness as the season of rebirth and renewal comes to its close, perhaps because it’s been a time of growth and new garden discoveries, yet much of it will end here, like the spring ephemerals that thrill and titillate and touch for a few brief weeks, giving an impression of everlasting freshness, only to wither away at the first spell of high heat and sun. Nothing gold can stay, I suppose.
As I careen through this third or fourth mid-life crisis (how unfair that certain people should have more than one, enough to lose count) I find myself in a contemplative mood as we near the end of spring. On the day this is being written, a thrashing of wind with an occasional outburst of rain wreaks havoc with the outside world. I watch from the window, hearing the mad rush over the roof and through the trees, their branches waving wildly in the shifting air. This music feels apt for the moment at hand, when the heart yearns to be still and quiet amid all the noise, emotional and otherwise.
Tornado warnings have been issued for our surrounding area. The sky in the distance has an enormous bank of dark clouds – ominously churning and moving in ways that clouds don’t usually move – headed in our direction. Inside of me, the heart now churns too, in ways that my heart doesn’t usually churn.
Outside, another banana leaf unfurls in the humidity and heat before the deluge. A glimpse of sun suddenly and somewhat ominously appears – it feels sickly, it feels off. It feels so wrong. Spring, ending on a tortured note; summer, hesitant to appear. I’m not ready for either.
Holding on to this spring – or any spring for that matter – is folly and madness. I don’t know why we bother, other than to make the inevitable end more miserable when it finally does arrive. Perhaps I had it right simply celebrating all those starts to summer instead of mourning the stops to spring. Now I am lost, mourning and missing and moving toward something I can’t quite see yet…
