What I really want to say about spring is...

Mom and Dad, 1952

What I want to say is, there’s nothing more welcome or more beautiful than spring in our Little Town. We’ve gone from another layer of snow last week, to an explosion of brilliant green and temps in the 80s, to rain and cool. Lilacs are budding; iris, lilies, columbine, and hollyhocks are all pushing up; a dozen wild turkey hens paraded down our street; our Little Town resident vultures have come back after a very successful winter south—when they circled over our backyard, I lost count at 55, and Ray says it was closer to 100.

I think what I really want to say is, I feel a little blindsided by this particular spring, which is also the first anniversary of my orphanhood: My mother died a year ago this month, after a years-long illness and slow decline, and my father died a month later, after his own years-long illness.

I’ve often said, it isn’t one event that sucks us under the waves—it’s an accumulation of events, the PILE-UP. And since 2020 with the pandemic, I’ve been in a kind of adrenaline-fueled fog of perpetual action and stress, my Superwoman crisis mode. Then 2021 brought “pandemic+” (a heart attack for Ray, multiple hospitalizations for Mom, Mom needing full-time care at home, and her decision to enter home hospice at the end of the year). Add in 2022’s deaths and debacles (see my Christmas 2022 post), and I’m pretty sure I was exhausted in body, mind, and spirit by the time the ball dropped on 2023.

I’d like to say that I still see hope on the horizon. Mom’s Bergenia is coming up, and when Ray raked out the hollyhock and iris beds a couple days ago, it was enough to make me cry, knowing how happy it would have made Mom. Ray and I laughed at the decorative marbles everywhere in the garden, where Mom had thrown them because they were “shiny.” I can still be slayed by the smallest reminders of her, found in corners where she’d lost or tucked them away—a hearing aid brush, a pearl fallen out of a ring, a note to her from a great-grandkid, tucked in a sock.

But what I’m also saying is, now with spring busting out all over, with no more classes to teach (I re-retired), with our health more or less stable, and with my general pace slowing and calming, I find I’m missing my parents terribly. This spring—a season Mom adored—reminds me I still have much work to do re-orienting my life on this new road. Maybe that work is never done. And I think I’m still exhausted, if that’s possible. I keep myself busybusybusy, warding off the Big Cry that I feel welling just under the surface, the kind of good cry that makes you take to your bed. I’ve been holding it back because, what if I can’t stop once it starts?

What I'm trying to say is, full steam ahead (or maybe half steam).  I’m breathing in spring after an extraordinarily long winter that started in 2020. I’ll keep slugging down coffee to stay awake, and I'll drink it on the porch in my pajamas. I'll keep plugging away at the inner work—Mom donated her body to the Med school of our Little Town U, so maybe once I get her ashes back (it can take up to 2 years) and scatter them in the places she loved, I’ll feel a shift. I’ll scrub the oriole and hummingbird feeders. I’ll switch from boots to sandals. Ray will get down the bikes, and the kayaks won’t be far behind. I’ll wear outfits specifically designed to call up Mom’s voice quipping, “Are you going out in public like that, dear?”

I guess I'm really just saying, spring is springing, and I’m okay. And to welcome spring’s renewal and to celebrate these bittersweet anniversaries, I’ll plant Cupid’s pansies this week (sorry…vague English teacher reference). You may even hear me singing (as Mom always told me to do, loud and off key, in troubled times), Battle Hymn of the Republic. 

 “We sat in silence, letting the green in the air heal what it could.” 

― Erica Bauermeister

Mom and Dad, 2019