6 posts tagged “spring”
They were waiting. Their shapes were wilting; the fine edges becoming dim and unfocused, like aged eyes. Their chlorophyll was running thin through a green cartography that was drying into faded rivers. The palm print of Summer pressed with an alchemist's anticipation - but the leaves, the waiting leaves, fought the heated transformation.
The triumph of Spring was over. Their birth had finished, when they had emerged in verdant curls from stems thick with the muscular promise of a growing season. Their green scent had been dainty and cool; Persephone's fragrance heralding her return from black obscurity.
But now the sun had run rampant across the sky; his heat turning the blue eternity into a blank wilderness. The leaves curdled during the fierce day; their fatigue betraying their internal botany.
So they were waiting.
They were waiting for the season of harvests; for the smell of horses waiting in the yellow fields, shivering under a rising equinox: they were waiting for the sunsets to burst in their veins, so they could fall once more into the darkness.
I have become reconciled to Spring. Even though it puts the soft chills of Autumn and Winter to flight, I do not resent that pastel-colored season. If Summer is a lazy voluptuous woman, immobile in her thick and fragrant bower, then Spring is blithe and slim: as changeable as sunlight under water, breaking into watery prisms, impossible to count.
Spring is busy. Nature's offspring are born during that verdant time, when the earth becomes lush again and the air is blue and spinning.
During these months, birds become loud, reckless and bold. Where I live, real estate is at a minimum, and the days are strident with their arguments. Gables, street signs, garages, rooftops - all are populated with perfect creatures that maneuver through the air with a mathematical ascendancy.
Their songs pierce the sunlight until the golden fabric becomes a pattern of their febrile joy.
When I walk to work, I always pass by a row of decorative shrubs: prickly, tropical and dense. Once, I heard in their sultry depths the plaintive pwee-pwee of a newborn bird - too childish to realize the danger of its voice. I stopped, hoping I could discern where the nest was. It was then that I saw a peculiar machine perched on top of the shrubbery. It was a mockingbird, rising its wings up and down like an automaton, a heraldic toy.
It was trying to make itself as intimidating as possible. But despite this whimsical masquerade, I moved closer. It was the sight of its needle-like beak, ready to embroider the skin of any intruder, that finally gave me pause. I spoke a few calming words, all the while waiting for the gasp of wings: the impatient breath in my ear should I not be retreating quickly enough.
I have often thought about the words I spoke to that angry parent. Mockingbirds are famous mimics, and I imagined this bird measuring my voice, analyzing its tonal equations. And I hope to hear it again one day, coming back from its green, concealed places or floating down to me from the sky.
Walking to work, I saw a very peculiar thing on the sidewalk. Its color was soft and meek: a whimsical fluff, a piece of delicate detritus which had somehow lost its way and now lay defenseless on the granite causeway.
What was it?
I couldn't pass it by - it was too bizarre, too exquisite, to ignore. It looked at first like a mass of grounded feathers, a detached wing, having somehow come to grief in a garish and unidentified battle. I peered closer closer, and the feathers because an explosion of silky fibers, and the wing opened into a seed pod, split and exposing a galaxy of birth, unraveling at my feet.
Its job was almost complete - only one seed remained.
Inside the barren husk, flights of fancy cast about the milky depths. I saw threads light enough to have burst from a captive princess' spinning wheel, sheer enough to embroider a satin bodice. They had loosed their future generations on the wind, bound for nurseries unknown.
I saw sparks of light in the constellation of strands - electric, white-hot filaments creating a grid of vibrant synapses. The finely spun froth seemed destined to melt, like fishes' breath rising from the waves. And yet, for all the life the life I saw inside this discarded shell, this was a dead thing.
I picked it up carefully, cradling it against the intrusive breezes, emboldened by the onrush of Spring. I carried it to work and once there brought it to my desk, where I could further admire it. But perhaps my admiration was shelfish; perhaps I should have left it outside, where it would have dissolved into Nature's graveyard, a part of the greening of her most precious jewel.
When I was walking home, I saw a curious thing rolling towards me. It was small and light; it was blown across the sidewalk like a bite of tumbleweed. Or it could have been spools of dust drummed up from earth by a confused wind - bursting into confused shapes as it bounced off the sidewalk.
I walked towards it - it was momentarily still, shaking and weary in the indeterminate breeze. I looked closely. It was a bird's nest. Made of countless threads of dried grass and stripped twigs, it was a woven home, a knit of natural things, gently made through the diligence of two sparrows. Little bursts of life, with songs of boldness and pride, they built their nests every Spring, following the commands of the DNA coursing through their veins.
And now the results of one couple's homemaking lay at my feet. The nest was the color of dried flax, and it was the size of a cupped hand. The middle was hollowed out and lined with pale, winsome feathers. Down, plume, semiplume: the parents had dug deep into their breasts to tear out a cushion of warmth that would complete a bed destined to protect a chorus of helpless lives.
Once part of a sparrow commune hidden in the shadowy, airless eaves of the welcoming houses, an errant wind had lifted it from its moorings like Dorothy's prairie home, and taken it for a ride of confusion on the airy columns, streams and currents. Only instead of stopping to crush a witch, it stopped in front of me.
I never completely understood the connection between Spring, Christianity, baby animals as gifts (who like as not were dead by June - what does a child do with a grown-up chicken? Why ignore it to death, of course), plastic eggs, colored eggs, chocolate eggs and bouffant, springy (ha) dresses. Really, a celebration of nature's rebirth, of the sun working into the evening seems to me more like a pagan's sigh of relief.
Anyway, there was a time when it all made sense. When I was two years old, Springtime, soft bunnies, hard dresses, chocolates and church all merged together on Easter:
Candies are not in evidence in this picture because I can safely say that I had already eaten them.
This was also the first day when I would be taken to church. My godmother made me a dress the color of a melted lemon drop, a liquid pastel; with skirts of organdy and a satin sash with a witty flower at its center. This was a special occasion, and I was wearing my Very Best Dress.
However. That morning I howled, I screamed, I cried - so stridently, so purely, so exquisitely, that my parents could do nothing else but haul me - poke bonnet and all - back home.
I'm not a fan of Spring. It is armed with pastels and mildness, telling you to come on, get up and be happy. The sky is bright and non-committal. These are constant reminders to shake yourself out of your Winter depths and step into the new, sunny physicality.
But I have noticed something else about Spring - something that none of the other seasons possess. These four sisters have their own celebrations, temperatures, colors. They pulse with their own passions. And they take breaths that are peculiar to their own personalities. In Summer, the breeze is sluggish, over-heated: a thick furnace. Autumn's breeze is cool and earthy, a growth of harvests, weary trees and dying flowers. The breezes of winter are plumes of teeth, sharp and biting.
But in Spring, the breeze is light, free and high. I can imagine it curling in colored ribbons around the tops of trees and the spinning shapes of weather vanes: ships, gulls, bi-planes...impudently speeding them on. These breezes are not weighed down with heat; they don't come from the uprooted earth; they are not bitter, spreading from icy jaws. They run above my reach, distant, and my thoughts can't help but give chase.
They don't come from my city. They haven't escaped from the gutters, stinking and unhealthy. They're not born from exhaust pipes or chimneys, heavy with soot - rancid with industry and a careless population.
I've always thought they they came from somewhere far beyond - beyond imagination, skipping past common sense, perfumed Zephyrs arriving from somewhere outside the mind's everyday considerations. I think they've returned from somewhere afar, bearing gifts and stories from faraway places.
They could have arrived from fluttering a castle's pennant, coming to me still holding the scent of its mossy walls. They could have just finished cooling the brows of grazing deer, calming their doe-eyed flightiness. Or perhaps they come to me after skimming over the surface of a foreign ocean, carrying to me froth, salt, the memories of glittering fish and scarred dolphins. Maybe they have returned from diving through fields of tall, fragrant grass, holding the microscopic seeds of future acres. Or have they come back from holding aloft an eagle hunting above a distant land, balancing each pinion on a cushion of air...and perhaps they are bringing back a dappled feather for me.
Did these breezes hear distant music - could they carry to me the ethereal strings, the pretty notes - and when they see me let a symphony settle gently on my shoulders? Did it travel by night - was it cooled by the stars? Did it dazzle the flowers - so that they couldn't help but ride along?
How far and wide does a Spring breeze roam? So vastly, so boldly, that only a dream can grab hold to it.
