It's a different kind of spring.
It's weird to have a birthday on which I know my mom won't call me and say, "Hi, babygirl!" and sing over the phone. Even if I anticipated the conversation to follow would be uncomfortable and tense or at least boring, it was something I could count on every year. No more.
I got my nails done last night and wore a skirt today so I could be pretty on my birthday. The outfit I'm wearing is one of my faves: a light blue sweater with those fake shirt cuffs and collar, a skirt covered in blue flowers and made from a vintage dress that never fit right and whose bodice I hacked off, and black Mary Jane heels. The funny thing about this outfit is that I wore it on one of my last days at my job at UNO. I wrote about the outfit and that day and how good and happy I felt. I think it was the last entry I wrote before my entries began turning to thoughts of a little hurricane entering the Gulf of Mexico and pointing its cone of impact somewhere in the general vicinity of New Orleans.
I also wore this outfit in Atlanta last September, after Katrina. That day, Blair and I got free massages at a massage school, and I went to Mass, and we had dinner with Jason, and when we got back to their house, I read the email from my aunt with the news of my mother's brain metastases.
I know I'm not the only person who remembers significant events in her life by the clothes she wore.
It's a springish outfit, what with the flowers and all, and spring is slowly materializing here in Connecticut. The trees are beginning to green. The tree-covered hills are still mostly brown, but I'd say about a fifth of the trees look fuzzy on top with their little baby leaves sprouting. Some trees have already burst with tiny, white flowers or stringy yellow ones or fluffy pink ones. The grass is becoming more vibrant.
It's an interestingly slow-paced process. In Pensacola, spring hits one day with a high in the upper 70s and a bright-pink blast of azaleas that sprouted overnight, and pretty much the next day, you want to lock yourself in the air conditioning and stay there until Thanksgiving. I'm trying to come up with southern parallels for the little early-blooming trees I'm seeing here, and I can't think of anything. Azaleas are radiant and bushy; individual dogwood flowers are bigger but more spare on the branches; gardenias don't cover their trees, nor do magnolias; hydrangeas just aren't as prevalent.
It's a different kind of spring. Lee and I were discussing how all that poetry about rebirth and spring makes sense now. It seems especially symbolic to me since winter was so hard. I'm glad it's warming, but I'm actually a little nervous about the weather getting nicer. That just means we're that many days closer to the first arctic blast of this year! I usually like the fall, but I'm afraid I'll dread it because it will just be a doorway to a new season of death.
That whole not-wanting-good-things-because-they-always-give-way-to-bad-things attitude I'm adopting lately really needs to get in check. I can't be existing that way. It's way uncool.
I got my nails done last night and wore a skirt today so I could be pretty on my birthday. The outfit I'm wearing is one of my faves: a light blue sweater with those fake shirt cuffs and collar, a skirt covered in blue flowers and made from a vintage dress that never fit right and whose bodice I hacked off, and black Mary Jane heels. The funny thing about this outfit is that I wore it on one of my last days at my job at UNO. I wrote about the outfit and that day and how good and happy I felt. I think it was the last entry I wrote before my entries began turning to thoughts of a little hurricane entering the Gulf of Mexico and pointing its cone of impact somewhere in the general vicinity of New Orleans.
I also wore this outfit in Atlanta last September, after Katrina. That day, Blair and I got free massages at a massage school, and I went to Mass, and we had dinner with Jason, and when we got back to their house, I read the email from my aunt with the news of my mother's brain metastases.
I know I'm not the only person who remembers significant events in her life by the clothes she wore.
It's a springish outfit, what with the flowers and all, and spring is slowly materializing here in Connecticut. The trees are beginning to green. The tree-covered hills are still mostly brown, but I'd say about a fifth of the trees look fuzzy on top with their little baby leaves sprouting. Some trees have already burst with tiny, white flowers or stringy yellow ones or fluffy pink ones. The grass is becoming more vibrant.
It's an interestingly slow-paced process. In Pensacola, spring hits one day with a high in the upper 70s and a bright-pink blast of azaleas that sprouted overnight, and pretty much the next day, you want to lock yourself in the air conditioning and stay there until Thanksgiving. I'm trying to come up with southern parallels for the little early-blooming trees I'm seeing here, and I can't think of anything. Azaleas are radiant and bushy; individual dogwood flowers are bigger but more spare on the branches; gardenias don't cover their trees, nor do magnolias; hydrangeas just aren't as prevalent.
It's a different kind of spring. Lee and I were discussing how all that poetry about rebirth and spring makes sense now. It seems especially symbolic to me since winter was so hard. I'm glad it's warming, but I'm actually a little nervous about the weather getting nicer. That just means we're that many days closer to the first arctic blast of this year! I usually like the fall, but I'm afraid I'll dread it because it will just be a doorway to a new season of death.
That whole not-wanting-good-things-because-they-always-give-way-to-bad-things attitude I'm adopting lately really needs to get in check. I can't be existing that way. It's way uncool.