rituals of spring

When I was 16, I spent a semester of high school living on a farm in Maine. I had never been away from home for more than six weeks, and that was only to visit my grandparents, which wasn’t a whole lot like being away. I didn’t think about it at the time, but it was a big deal for my mom that I went, as it left her living at home alone. To stay in touch, she would of course call me too often, and she sometimes sent me letters. One afternoon in February, I came home to find a postcard from her waiting on my bed. The front was illustrated, a line drawing of flowers or something simple like that. But when I flipped it over, it said something I marveled at. You don’t, as a child, realize how much your parents are watching you in wonder. You don’t realize what they are taking note of, feeling proud of, feeling they know you because of. What my mom wrote on that postcard was also simple, and it was this: You aren’t here to count the daffodils, so I’ve done it for you. There are 72 buds on the front slope and another 15 or so out back. I’ll write you more about them when they blossom; in the meantime, I thought you’d want to know.

How did she know about this ritual of mine? Sitting on my bed in Maine, looking out the window at four feet of snow, it was hard to imagine the first flowers of spring reaching up toward the sun so far south of me. How could my mother so acutely sense that I’d be missing them, missing taking stock of each day’s changes? I had always loved spring, being born at the height of it in Atlanta and feeling that the coinciding of my birthday celebrations with life bursting forth from the leaves gave me a special bond with the season, a more personal involvement with it. I loved to keep track of its progress, knowing that the daffodils and crocuses came first, in early February; that soon after would poke out the purple tips of redbud branches and then the pink and white florets of dogwoods, the pompom-esque flurry of azaleas, the light dusting of petals around the Bradford pears. In Maine, I would learn, first came forsythia, and long before anything else. The little yellow flowers would light up the skyward-reaching branches like small flames, and I thought this exceptional, and incomparable, until I found a hillside covered in forget-me-nots and learned that spring comes in all colors, even almost-florescent ones, and I had to make a mental note that these might be flowers to take a census of too.

But in San Francisco, spring has been a bit of a shock. While there are a delightful number of new flowers and trees for me to learn the names of here, and while their year-round blooming certainly adds to the city’s ambiance, I feel thankful for the jacarandas, which really do bloom at a spring-like time of year. The unwillingness of the rest of the trees to do this throws me. The first two years I lived here, I couldn’t believe that Japanese magnolias were flowering in January or that the millions of trees with red and yellow balls of fluff for flowers (whose name I still don’t know) come to life by then too. Then there are the moon flowers, also known as princess bush, which, like bouganvillea, seem to blossom throughout the year, either eight times over or just plain constantly. And while I should rejoice in living somewhere with a twelve-month-long spring, I get frustrated, because I am shut out of experiencing the inching toward and then exuberant bursting into spring that I so love.

This year, however, the weather gods seem to be on my side. We had a longer, colder winter than usual, and we had that terrible rainstorm that blew all the trees to pieces. I assume these things are what gave us the delayed spring I’ve been taking note of—the sudden, at a very appropriate time, flowering of fruit trees around the city; the poking out all at once of the green tips of new leaves; the sidewalk beauty of clusters of my beloved daffodils. Observing these small changes is a simple but precious pleasure of mine, and in honor of it, I annually get out the 1100-page tome of e.e. cummings poetry that I consider a scripture and read some of his marvelous musings on spring. I thought I’d share with you a poem of his that describes it so much better than I ever could.

Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)and

without breaking anything.