Twice a week, I babysit for an Israeli family. My job is to pick up their six-year-old son and take him home from school and play with him for two hours. This kid loves lavender. He grabs fistfuls from the bushes on the Queen Anne sidewalks and puts it in my face, then in his pocket. In the winter, I taught him to say “rosemary” in English. Sometimes I’d eat sprigs of it and make funny faces to make him laugh.
But now, there’s more to say than “rosemary:” now, there are “daffodils” and “crocuses.”
Today, the following happened:
- The sun was hot on my left arm on the 520 Bridge.
- I turned on the air conditioning for the first time in 2018.
- I couldn’t find my sunglasses, and I needed them.
This will be my 28th spring. Spring lives up to its name as well as fall does. It’s winter, and then you catch a whiff here or there of something not cold or dormant, but you don’t think anything of it, but then the trees are pink and fluffy one morning, and then the middle-aged men stop wearing socks with their Keens, and then the birds come back, and then you find yourself ordering iced coffee, and then inevitably, there’s a commitment you must wake up early for the morning after Daylight Savings ends, and then it’s just another week or so, and bam. Officially (a word I first learned from my mom in this very context) spring.
What an appropriate name.
Spring: if you made it this far and got through the winter okay, with all that dark and rain and trees the color of concrete, you’re going to be just fine. Better than fine. I like to revel in my specificity, and I try to appreciate when each season does the same, but, all things being equal, there’s nothing as promising as the vernal equinox.
And yes, at this latitude, between this water and this mountain range, the warmth won’t be a given until the 5th of July, but still. Knowing that it’s spring and that the sun is close and the flowers are beginning their relay races of blooming makes everything bearable. Better than bearable. Feet are bare-able.
I celebrate spring’s advent by sitting inside all day to write about how nice it is outside. The sun’s still in the sky, so instead of doing that some more, I get out of the house and walk around Fremont, the part near the zoo, which is a good idea.
I’m looking perhaps for some tender buds to photograph and slap on this blog page. But does the world really need another picture of flowers? No. I take a picture of the sunset instead.
Chelsea the Writer 