Spring!

I grew up in a place that got a fair amount of snow, where spring sets in so gradually, with small steps each day until finally, finally, sometime around April, the likelihood of a late-winter storm is replaced by sunny days and green grass. Here in the PNW, however, spring sneaks up on us. The grass is green all winter, the plants still growing, and the ground rarely frozen. But suddenly, one day in late February or March, the sun comes out, the air warms up and everything jumps into action.

Yesterday was that day. And every year, those of us who have been hibernating in our hygge-filled homes start to emerge. The bickering children who have had months-long cabin fever are all of a sudden climbing trees, playing in the dirt, and leaving shoes and socks and jackets all over the yard again. Neighbors start running into each other again, chatting and catching up. Even the birds, who never go away and never go hungry around here, start making their presence known.

It’s my happiest time of the year. Yesterday I got to sit outside on an overturned bucket, watching my kids climb higher in a fir tree than I really wanted them to, while Forrest tilled the gardens and talked about the book he’s reading. And tomorrow, I’m going to start some seeds so that when the tulips finish blooming I’m ready to go.

I spend a lot of my life feeling tired. Even as I write this, part of me wants to crawl back onto the couch and just close my eyes for a few minutes. But something about spring draws me back into the world. Even when the world feels so bright and so harsh and still full of fear and pain, there’s transformation around every corner. And those small transformations - from a weedy mess to a freshly tilled garden, from a sullen tween to a red-cheeked, dirt-covered adventurer, from a seed to a sunflower, - those transformations remind me that larger transformations are possible.

This spring feels more fraught than the last few, and that’s saying something. But we’ll get nowhere if we’re forget that our small pieces can add up to a world that is utterly changed, made new by sunshine and digging our hands in the dirt. Our world can get better and we can do our bit to make it so.