Spring

For years I have contemplated writing an essay about Spring – or, more precisely, an essay about what Spring means to me.  And for years I have resisted.  It has seemed too great a task.  It has felt beyond me.  For I realized to write about Spring is to get to the very essence of what made me become a writer in the first place, what made me want to travel in the first place…the very essence of what makes me me in the first place.

Well, I’m still resisting, and it still may be beyond me.  But here goes.

 Where I live, Chicago, you see Spring first.  Its harbingers are myriad manifestations of light. The first shine on our apartment wall in late February, refracted off the high rise across the street.  Then, a few weeks later, come the golden shafts of dazzling sun when it’s clear, the muted, dreamy pastel washes of blues and grays when it is not, the subtle, lingering haze at dawn and twilight, the way the moon shines cold and warm at once. Often I see this light through veils of heavy snow, on days when the temperature is far below the freezing mark.  But I know, immutably and irrevocably, that it – Spring - is arriving.

Secondly, you feel Spring, usually on a gout of wind or a pocket of air that just touches you differently, that’s just softer somehow than any air you’ve felt for months.  It comes like a wonderful memory you didn’t know you had, and it feels so good you could just laugh or cry, or both.  It is at this moment that I usually declare spring has arrived.  This moment is totally arbitrary, and usually followed immediately by the harshest of winter weather.  But once this moment has arrived, there is no going back.  It is Spring, from that point on. Even on those damnably bright, sunny bitter cold days near the lake (some of which come around in June), it is still Spring.  Even when there are whiteout blizzards, it is Spring.  I’m sorry but this decision is final.

Then (and some years this comes before the feeling), you hear it.  What does Spring sound like?  It sounds like the way traffic noise carries to you from the distant interstates, louder and clearer yet somehow more evocative than in the dead of winter, like the hiss of breakers on distant atolls.  The trill of dawn birdsong recommencing, a sound so familiar you scarcely realize it’s been months since you heard it (until you notice the swelling of your heart).  The distant whine of small motors, chainsaws mostly, and the thud of hammering, as people rebuild and clear away the detritus of winter, sounds that echo and expand on the swollen air.  The shrill, shivering, heartbreaking, utterly indomitable song of the spring peepers, that comes even on the coldest of Spring nights (as though they too hold to the maxim that once spring has arrived, it doesn’t leave again); it is a sound that makes me hopeful and sad in the same measure, in the same way the song of the loon affects those whose hearts swell for the coming of autumn.

Finally, you smell it.  How to describe the scent of spring?  It is similar in mood and tone to the feeling you get when the warm winds touch you for the first time, possessing that same elation and sense of profundity, but it carries with it also a sense of longing, of leave-taking, of reconnecting to the earth and the spirit that lurks just beneath (or beyond) it, beyond all that we see and touch and feel.  It is the realization that there is hope, and always has been, and always will be.  It is the realization that, though you may not be a good enough writer to say – or even approach – the great unknowable, you must at least try, and goddamn will.  It is the realization that there is God, whatever you conceive God to be.  It is a connection to the world, and to the beyond, and to yourself, and the ultimate dawning that there is no separation between any of these.  Those beautiful images that lie just beyond perception, that scatter when waking after the deepest dreaming, are almost, almost made tangible.

     

And then it is Spring, truly, magically, maddeningly spring.  The time of warm Sake and Japanese ghost movies (this is my essay, remember), of marking, on the way to the car after work, that there is just a little bit more light on the edge of the sky than there was at this time last week, of hiking trips on soft evenings that break your heart over and over, of rings around the moon, of the sound of distant thunder, of the smell of the earth turning in its dreams.  Of ancient Chinese poetry, and music, and art, and dinner in Chinatown on nights where lights bleed like steam upward into the expanse, commingling with the scents of fried dumplings and fried tofu and fried pig’s blood jelly on toast.  Of sitting on the balcony and attempting to read but losing your train of thought, over and over, at the beauty and wonder and strangeness of it all.  Of the way even the cold feels different.  Of the way seeing baseball on TV for the first time gets you in the same way it did when you were nine, and thinking about the long season makes you smile even when the Cubs look to be awful (like now).  Of the way the moon looks when it hits the earth, and the way it casts shadows differently than at any other time of the year.  Of people emerging from their homes like shy animals from tunnels and caves, and, even in Chicago, smiling at strangers and looking them in the eyes.  Of the way the world seems simultaneously big and small.  Of the earth calling you softly by your name, and telling you, in a voice like the soughing of wind in pines, to venture forth, that you are an expected guest, old friend.

That moment when I know – know – that Spring has arrived is different every year.  The only thing each year’s moment has in common with those of previous years is the conviction, the certainty that, after a long and, in retrospect at least, undeviating winter, It has arrived.

One March Saturday, I was driving down to Purdue University in northcentral Indiana to see a few friends.  It was snowing heavily at twilight.  I passed an electrical tower, blinking in the swirling gloom, and something hit me, right then, despite all evidence to the contrary, that it was now Spring.  And it was.  The sky behind the blinking red lights, the severe and anachronistic and subtly antagonistic steel frame of the tower, above the snowclad pines, roiled in a way that belied everything else, that made me think of storms in tropical climes, paper lanterns swinging in a soft and mild yet telling breeze.

On another March Saturday, my wife, Patricia, and I were watching snatches of a Japanese movie in between trips down to the laundry room.  On what should have been our last trip, we arrived in the laundry room to find it filled with smoke.  One whole load of clothes (mine mostly) was singed and ruined.  I tried to separate what was saveable from what was not, but soon found myself overcome by the smoke and fumes.  Thus, I staggered outside into our building’s brief courtyard and immediately inhaled great gouts of…soft Spring air.  That afternoon, like all the afternoons before it for several months, had been cold, dry, windy, and utterly uninspiring.  The night air that I now sucked greedily into me was warm, fragrant, deeply healing.  My heart soared, even as a I doubled over, hacking, even as I lamented the loss of several pairs of my favorite underwear.

One year, Spring came in the form of an extended forecast that occurred simultaneously with the beginning of a glorious convalescence.  I had been sick, excruciatingly, for a week, and the night before, a Thursday, just after I had called off my fifth day of work in a row, I lay back on the couch and literally marveled at how unbelievably sick I was.  My entire body hurt and I couldn’t breathe for coughing.  I was scheduled to head down to Indianapolis that weekend for a Teachers’ Union conference, but had staggered to bed thinking there was no way in hell I was going to Indy or anywhere.  The weather, throughout that long illness, had been windy and bitterly cold, the kind of weather that saps hope and energy even when one feels good.  But the next morning (Friday), I woke up feeling much better, so much so that I felt on the verge of thankful tears.  Then I looked at the extended forecast and saw that, for the next two weeks, every day had predicted highs of at least 60 degrees.  I cried, quietly into my folded arms, as light and much warmer air flowed over me.

One year, the way the sky looked through my classroom window told me Spring was here. It was a weekday morning, it was rainy, and it was not particularly warm.  But that heavy sky through my window was enough.  I wrote the following on Facebook:

“‘Spring

a nameless hill

in the haze’ - Basho

(Captures in seven words everything I have been trying - and failing - to say about Spring for the past 20 years of writing.)

It is Spring and my heart rejoices for it.”

One year, Spring arrived (arbitrarily, immutably) in late February.  I tried to discount it, tried to call it “Pre-Spring vibes.” But the way it arrived, completely unexpectedly on a Tuesday morning after one of the most dismal, depressing weeks I’ve ever had, precluded this denial.  I had not been sleeping, Patricia had been out of town, the weather had been bad even by February in the Midwest standards, and, despite a few posts on Facebook that professed optimism but really sounded like what they were (cries from the fathomless depths), I felt an absolute abeyance of hope.  My days consisted primarily of shuffling, as quickly as I could, from the apartment to the car, from the car to the school (teach, lament, stare longingly out the window), from the school to the car, and then from the car to the apartment.  Nothing had prepared me, not even the forecast, for that miraculous sunny, soft, warm, melting-snow, spirit- salving morning, but I adjusted, really quickly.

One year, 2018, Spring just would not come.  Every week, I would look at the forecast and see that, while the current week was supposed to be quite cold, the following week was to get into the 50s.  However, through March and even into April, those 50s just never arrived.  Every day was dishearteningly cold, bleak, windy and often snowy.  April 14^th topped out at 23 degrees.  I made light of it, made a joke of my bitter complaining, but it was a cruel joke, and I was deeply sad.  The weather just would not break.  That was bad enough.  But to be disappointed, over and over, by hopeful forecasts that never manifest in reality was a bridge too far.  Thus, nearly mad with frustration, I booked a night at a backcountry campground at a county park near Danville, Illinois on the last Saturday of April.  More than a hundred miles from frigid Lake Michigan, the weather was supposed to be okay…and okay that year could pass for transcendent.  That Saturday started chilly (what else was new?) by the lake, but, as I rolled south out of the industry of Chicagoland and into the farmland, the air softened, almost to the point I could unroll the windows.  Almost.  I arrived at the park in the late afternoon, packed up, and headed out on my five-mile hike to the site.  It was cool but good walking weather, not divine but not infuriating either.  As I walked and warmed up, so too did the day.  By the time I arrived at the campground, in early twilight, the air had softened to real mildness.  The campground was full, but the sites were well spaced, so I could see people but not really hear them. This was a perfect set up, affording privacy without dampening the communal sense.  I strolled to the one empty site, doffed my pack, and relished the mild breeze.  I felt as an expected guest, surrounded by friends of long standing.  At the site closest to mine, a woman was camping alone with her dog, tending a fire adjacent her small tent.  At another, a couple sat, huddled together though the evening was far from cold.  As I pitched the tent and stoked the fire, waves of gratefulness flowed over and through me, for, though late, Spring had arrived, and all was well and all manner of thing would be well.  I slept deeply during a night that grew warmer and warmer as it progressed, and, in the morning, hiked to the car through full-on Spring, feeling as though I had slept for weeks and not hours.  Everything was suddenly green, flowering, blooming.

*

Spring, it should be noted, is not my favorite season.  (That would be Summer.)  Too much of it is cold, damp, frustrating, filled with potential that is not realized.  But there is just something about the emerging – or even the sense of emerging - from winter’s dark that feels so much deeper than merely pleasant, that feels so much more uplifting than merely awakening...that feels, in truth, akin to a resurrection. 

That may sound a tad hyperbolic, and perhaps it is.  But only a tad.

And it’s not that I hate winter.  I adore the coziness of it, how the snow turns blue at twilight, how the the clouds over Lake Michigan look positively tropical sometimes, how a heavy snow smells and sounds as it hishes down.  I love that I can take a nap on the couch without feeling guilty for wasting the day.

But when Spring comes, fully, and you grasp it, fully, there is just nothing like it.  And that it happens over and over and over, every year, is one of life’s great treasures.

Or should I say, one of life’s great miracles?

Spring’s arrival tells us we can begin again.  We can hope again.  Maybe simply we can again.  And I love that, almost more than anything.

April 13, 2022