Spring.
A season entirely devoted to emerging, growing, changing. A season I’ve honestly never really enjoyed or understood until now. I always seemed to resent spring because it was that uncomfortable moment in time right before summer: the place I really wanted to be.
This last winter in the Pacific Northwest broke me. I say that entirely without dramatic effect. It’s a simple fact. The constant rain which would alternate between a soggy mist that hung on your clothes or an outright downpour that felt like a shower had officially driven me mad. The Seattle Times kept reporting that it was one of the worst years of rainfall on record. No matter. I wasn’t going to hold out for another winter season in my life that would be less intense, less desperate. Saying “it will get better soon” was no longer good enough for me. Once you’ve experienced the freedom of true summer with the sun warm on your back, the liberating feeling of walking outdoors in bare feet and wearing loose shirts that don’t cling to you like personal protective gear, you can’t go back. You don’t want to wait for things to get better. You want to already be out there in the world making them better. Living.
I’d begun to look at winter as this season you had to endure. You’d put your big girl boots on and just tough it out. Every. Single. Day. For about 6 months. And then before you knew it, one day you would wake up after the 4th of July and realize that summer was well and truly here and it was time to live out those magical brief weeks of freedom with abandon.
It’s just that spring was sort of in the way. You had to get through that first. The season when you didn’t really know what clothes to wear out of the house because it might be sunny or cold or warm or wet outside. And this could change in the space of a few hours. A season that is unpredictable and a little adolescent in its awkward attempt at evolving into summertime.
Over the years it slowly became evident to me that I was in a cycle. A loop of waiting. Winter was something I had to get through in every sense. The uninspiring job, the withdrawn people, the days and nights spent indoors looking at the bare, dead trees and gray skies. I wasn’t even showing up to my own life. I was hibernating during this season with my brain and my emotions on pause. My needs and wants waiting in a storage closet. When summer did eventually come, it would feel like this wild time to escape captivity, go feral and pack in every possible moment of relaxed freedom before the realities of winter would set back in. I’d skip directly from the lows of winter to the highs of summer and back again. It was exhausting.
This year, however, I look at each opening new flower bud and every break of sun through the clouds with a sense of hope. Right now I am experiencing spring in every sense. My entire life is in a sort of full-blown springtime renaissance. I weathered the winter. I waited and I dreamed about summer. Imagined those warm summer days a little bigger and brighter than usual. And I decided to move into springtime and acknowledge that summer wouldn’t come next. First I needed to pack up and acknowledge spring. I needed to accept the uncomfortable period of change that comes before anything and everything else.
Transitional and unsettled is my new norm. My clothes are all condensed into a suitcase containing both fleece pullovers and cut-off shorts and I don’t even have a mailing address at the moment. Yes, that feels like a season of springtime. But I am embracing it. I am heading out of what has felt like an endless winter and spending those difficult transitional spring months searching for my summer. And this time I am free to make my own summer. To experience it however I want and make this thing I’ve been dreaming of into a reality.
I’ve left behind the sureness of a season I understand how to get through, how to endure, for something not entirely unknown but certainly uncomfortable. I have no idea what is waiting for me on the other side but I am so ready to take that chance and find out what it looks like.
What does spring remind you of? What does spring mean to you?