“…you could see the spring coming each day
until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it
back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a
season out of your life. . .Part of you died each year when the leaves fell
from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold,
wintry light. But you knew there would
always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was
frozen. When the cold rains kept on and
killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason. . ."*
Every year it’s the same
story—the earth dies, and rises again to new life in the spring. The soul follows the same pattern.
To be honest, it gets old after a
while. Year after year, you’re cruising
along and everything is great and then the holidays come around and they should
be enjoyable but they’re just stressful
and then they’re over and you think you can breathe a sigh of relief and start
fresh with the new year, but the new year is full of its own challenges and
changes and bitterly cold days and snowy mornings and snowy evenings and
salt-covered shoes that lead to salt-covered floors and sickness here and there
and then here again because your stress is so high that your immunity is shot
to hell and you know spring is just around the corner, and finally it’s the
first of March, and still you drive
to work through four inches of snow and ice and wonder why you are risking your
life for coffee, because that’s what you do for a living, you make coffee.
Then one fine day, the weathermen
say it’s going to start warming up tomorrow, and your wedding present has
arrived from Denmark—a coffee maker, the finest in the world, proven to produce
a nearly perfect cup of coffee every time.
Suddenly you see yourself ten, twenty, thirty years from now brewing
coffee with this same coffee maker and sitting across from the man who loves
you even when you go off in a hangry rage at Wal-mart because the brooms aren’t
where you think they should be and you didn’t eat enough for breakfast.
As you sit in the parking lot of
Home Depot nomming on your filets o’fish and he watches you with skeptical
eyes, willing your body to accept this food so that you don’t go into a hangry
rage inside Home Depot too, you realize that it’s not as warm out as the
weathermen said it would be, and you aren’t surprised because it never snowed
when they said it would and always snowed when they said it wouldn’t, but you
know that when the snow does melt, you’ll be better. Because every year, it’s true. It’s never perfect, but it’s always better in
the spring (and the summer, and the fall).
Just when the weary soul can’t
take much more of the constant reaching and hoping for a glimpse of spring, it
comes.
It comes on a ray of sunshine
from the east, down the street and to my right it shines its light on the cold
pavement, causes the dumpy leftover piles of snow to bleed into the street and
pool puddles of mud on the sidewalks. The
trees are bare but still, and from one nearby comes the soft chirping song of a
bird. It isn’t snowing. The sky isn’t a depressing canvas of gray. The muddied grass mirrors the weathered and
worn soul, but it is green enough that one truth pervades--
spring is
coming.
“In those days though, the spring always came finally, but it was frightening that it had nearly failed.”*
*A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway
