Almost Spring

 

The weather has been unseasonably warm here for the past week, and as I was out walking the dog this morning, I spied the shoots of some crocuses peeping through their bed of dead leaves. I wanted to cheer - it's a sure sign spring is on the way. I wanted to push them back under their covers - hadn't they seen the forecast?  The temperature is going to plummet back down to the mid-teens in the wee hours of Thursday morning.

I had to have a stern talk with me this morning as I was driving to my exercise class. Despite the beautiful weather, I was fretting about the cold days to come. Hasn't the last decade taught me anything about enjoying the days I have?

As a way to reground myself, as I left class to drive home, I put the top down on the car, still whining just a bit because it's too cold in February for such nonsense. But, I was wrong - it was just right.

The air was cool, but not cold, and the sun warmed my face and hair as I meandered down the road. I stopped at a stoplight and lifted my gaze to see a hawk drifting overhead. My ears thrilled to hear the soaring song of a pair of cardinals.

Ready or not, spring is just around the corner. 

I think it might be the after-effects of repairing Grandma's quilt, but as these winter days slip away, I've spent many hours pondering the little I know of her life. I've tried to put myself in her shoes, on that homestead farm in north-central Minnesota. She started her life in a house lit with candles, heated with an iron stove. In her first married years, she did the laundry for her brood (which grew to eight boys and one girl) in washtubs, eliciting help from the boys to turn the crank on the wringer. She lived as technology started to change the world for the better - was one of the first in town, according to the family history book I was looking through, to get a gasoline-powered washing machine. She saw the birth of the electrification of this country, the changeover from horse-drawn equipment to automobiles and tractors.

How long ago those days seemed when I first learned of them as a child. How close they feel now, as I quickly approach the age she was when I first remember hearing her warm welcome as we piled from the car into her kitchen.

I once thought time was linear, orderly. I no longer see it that way. Where the seasons once cycled in a  leisurely fashion, the color of each iteration new and sharp and distinct in its turn, they now take on more of the aspect of a kaleidoscope, the jumbled color fragments no longer distinct as the moments tumble by, but still beautiful.

Life is Good.