To Know the Good Around Us

Riding home from church, lying down with my head tilted up, I watched yards of lace pass overhead. The trees are awake again, and their lines sketch the sky with reds and greens and yellows. When I first noticed spring, the bare branches were hands lightly raising frothy orbs, but now the color has seeped downward and bolted through all the lower branches as well. When I was much younger I didn't understand why spring, which then seemed mostly mud and gray and endless waiting for school's shackles to fall away, would sent my mother into rapturous monologue. Now, feeling ages and not at all older than I was then, I know.

I haven't walked through woods and meadows to see what grows, but I can imagine what waits there, alive and hidden from view. The silver traces of birch now strikingly offset with green, fiddleheads not yet uncurled, the uncomplicated whites and yellows of bloodroot and trillium, and, if you're lucky enough to see him, Jack may sit in his pulpit, just waiting to be smushed.

Some colors are soft and subtle, all whispers and tendrils, and others so shocking in their vibrancy, one wonders if they think no one would notice their presence without that enjoyable assault on the senses. "We're here! We're here!" they shout with wild bursts of yellow, small explosions of pink. "Welcome us!" And I do.

The birds have returned to our bedroom wall and many more sing tirelessly outside. One in particular made me laugh out loud the other day, his call ceaseless and shrill with such obvious urgency that I wondered what he clamored about-- a bachelor unhappy to be so, flapping his wings and indignant at being repeatedly passed over for more handsome specimens.

I think of my children listening to me exclaim, as my mother did before me, heady with smells, sights, sounds-- all that should be familiar after a lifetime of seasons returning, but what remains uncommon and seems utterly new each year. Maybe they won't be as dull as I was, and will see the largess of spring rising up wherever one turns. I can't imagine it otherwise, as they run indoors to announce in great excitement each newly sprung dandelion, violet, or lilac bud readying to burst. The table has already held a dozen cups filled with motley color wrenched from our yard. Next year, Lord willing, when Buster is safely out and I'm allowed to explore again (and with Buster in tow) they'll uncover yet more, and I, too, will taste that rampant delight.