Playing Again
Spring is like the movie you love to watch over and over, with every appearance a director’s cut so that there is always something new to see. The season unfolds in roughly the same fashion year after year, and the same plants in their order, but there is always a slight difference each time, a profusion this year, a slight delay the next, perhaps even a dieback.
Then every watching of the season, with all the cuts and changes, layers itself in your mind, until spring, as it comes, brings forth not only flowers and buds and leaves but memories of the same going back as far as you can remember. The spring you’re watching is the spring you saw before and the spring you’ll see next year, impossible to forget but impossible, as well, to predict.
The roses on my porch are blooming, and I remember buying them, and planting them, and trimming them back, and watching them bloom, and smelling their fragrance. And it’s the same with the orchid tree, the coral sage, the mesquite in the wildflower garden, the small oaks that are now big and forming a tiny meadow, the impressively tall Eve’s Necklace, and the peach tree laden with fruit once again. Spring, a balm for the wounds of winter, a time of healing and rebirth, playing again in a garden near you or in your mind.
John W. Wilson is the author of The Long Goodbye: A Caregiver’s Tale