False Spring

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It is warm today. Warm for January anyway, and there is a bright, sharp sun hanging low in a cloudless blue sky. The air has the clear, slightly damp quality that makes you think of spring. The snow is melting, but slowly, there is a lot of snow here to melt. Icicles drip and break off making little cairns of broken ice on the ground below the eaves of roofs.

I send myself out into this sunlight and dampness. I bundle the baby in his warm suit, the one with the moose antlers that makes him look a little like an unfortunate extra in the school play, and we start to walk. I think he will like seeing the  bright sky and the silhouettes of tree branches from the vantage point of the stroller, maybe he does, but then he is asleep and I am left with only my own thoughts for company. 

I am thinking about spring. In winter I sometimes worry that I am thinking my life away, planning and dreaming of a season that is still months away. But I can’t help myself! I am in love with all the possibilities of spring. Then, as I jam the stroller through a slushy, muddy, slippery patch of half melted ice and standing water and now I can feel the cold wet seeping through my socks, I remember that I hate spring. Not all spring, but early spring for sure. It’s wet, and cold and muddy. And unlike this false spring I am enjoying today, real spring is full of chores and racing the calendar and hoping for the right weather on the day you planned for the job that requires that particular weather. This false spring is a free day, a day without any pressures to mulch tender shoots or to start that next batch of seedlings or call to schedule deliveries of trees and pavers. 

I glance up, at the view the baby would be seeing, if he hadn’t tumbled off to sleep as soon as my steps found a rhythm. There is a magnolia tree, with small, gray, fuzzy flame-shaped buds perfect and upright against the blindingly blue sky. I am no longer dreaming of spring, I am right here, in this winter moment, with all the possibility inside me. Like the magnolia tree, whose feet are also wet and cold, and who is turning itself toward the sun.