sprink
Spring usually fills me with dread. There's a specific melancholy to it. So around this time of year - on the cusp of the vernal equinox, while we're listening to winter's last complaints - I try to take comfort in middlemarch and be present in it while it lasts.
It's been this way since childhood. Warm weather would come, bright sun, sweet breezes, and everyone in the universe was suddenly absurdly euphoric. I just didn't get it. I'd be holding on to the windowsill in my bedroom tight with all hands, saying, please, not yet, can't it snow just one more time?
Winter means that I can hide. Under layers of clothes, layers of blankets. I can hide indoors, or under cover of long darkness. I can wear my heaviest, blackest, noise-canceling headphones. I can vanish into snowy woods. I'm not seen and not heard.
Spring means I have to come out of my shell. Shed the clothes in public. Don earbuds. Attend birthday parties and cookouts. Be seen. Cavort. Transition, somehow, into extroversion.
I feel a certain pressure come spring. It's as though the earth is demanding something from me. As though it's saying, Be beautiful. Be young again. Shine your light, show your colors. Grow. Lift your spirits. Just try to match or even approach the optimism in these white blossoms on the apple tree!
It's a lot to ask.
I'm secretly overjoyed that we're having a raw windy wet blast, a good solid gray-green March. I'll hold onto that overcoat feeling as long as I can.
Because once April asks me to walk around outside in a t-shirt, I'll feel completely out of my element. Unarmored. When our magnolia shudders with pink, it's almost frightening.
It's been this way since childhood. Warm weather would come, bright sun, sweet breezes, and everyone in the universe was suddenly absurdly euphoric. I just didn't get it. I'd be holding on to the windowsill in my bedroom tight with all hands, saying, please, not yet, can't it snow just one more time?
Winter means that I can hide. Under layers of clothes, layers of blankets. I can hide indoors, or under cover of long darkness. I can wear my heaviest, blackest, noise-canceling headphones. I can vanish into snowy woods. I'm not seen and not heard.
Spring means I have to come out of my shell. Shed the clothes in public. Don earbuds. Attend birthday parties and cookouts. Be seen. Cavort. Transition, somehow, into extroversion.
I feel a certain pressure come spring. It's as though the earth is demanding something from me. As though it's saying, Be beautiful. Be young again. Shine your light, show your colors. Grow. Lift your spirits. Just try to match or even approach the optimism in these white blossoms on the apple tree!
It's a lot to ask.
I'm secretly overjoyed that we're having a raw windy wet blast, a good solid gray-green March. I'll hold onto that overcoat feeling as long as I can.
Because once April asks me to walk around outside in a t-shirt, I'll feel completely out of my element. Unarmored. When our magnolia shudders with pink, it's almost frightening.