This is Spring

Several times each day, I walk the five or six blocks from my house down 2nd/Victoria Avenue to my office. Two or three round trips a day. Snow. Rain. Sun. Wind. And through the changes, one to the other. The walk settles. Forces me into a slower pace and, one step at a time, connects me intimately with the day. I watch the motion from morning to night and the changing of the seasons from day to day. These walks free me to watch, to pay attention to the incremental movements–fall changing to winter and winter moving into spring.

In the last month, the willows dropped their winter drab brightening into sharp shards of yellow in anticipation of spring. Once “dead� sticks on hedges now push buds and in the last two days, the buds show a hint of green.

On the walk, I pass one house where each morning the resident sets out pots with daffodils, crocuses and then takes them in each night for protection. They sit a bright spot on the walk. Another house harbored crocuses and daffodils in a sheltered corner where the front porch meets the main house. For a couple weeks, they flourished and then, a week ago, one cold hard night flattened the stalks. Now yellow and purple blooms lie limp on the broken bare dirt of the corner. Half a promise of spring, but just half.

Spring in the mountains. One day, winter. One day, spring. One day, summer. Random motion between the seasons often without reference to the predictions of the weatherman or the conditions in the morning.

There can be no plans. Just the moment. What is best?

Wake up to 10cm and it’s a morning for the hill. Wake up to sun and 10 degrees and it’s a day for the bike.

Just as often, it’s 10 cm in the morning and bikes in the afternoon.

Yesterday on my walk, the first of the leaves broke the casings, chasing sun like butterflies breaking from a chrysalis. Wrinkled. Twisted. Luminescent green, they spread, self-assured this is spring.

This is Spring.