In twenty-eight years of life, I have never so looked forward to the spring.
Seattle, for eight months out of twelve, holds her own among the cities of America for beauty; the south side of Bellingham, if possible, is even prettier. We've got Mt. Baker on one side and the bay on the other, quaint little neighborhoods, and Western Washington University's campus. Western has so many hidden beauties that to appreciate it fully, one has to walk it once during the daylight, again at sunset on a clear day, and again at night, preferably in that order.
We pay for the glories of spring, summer, and fall during the winter. Everything goes gray. The sky, the streets, the buildings, the trees, the ground, the rain, the air. The clouds move down and close in on the valleys, and this girl--raised under Montana's Big Sky--finds it hard to breathe at times.
The day I could finally look out my window and see green this year made my week. And just this week, the weather changed too; the chill left the air, and even the rainy and windy days feel... well, like May instead of January.
I know that the comparison between seasons and life ranks high on the list of overused, overtired ideas, right up at the top with "You'll understand better when you grow up" and keeping Christmas in the heart all year long. So I'll just say that maybe spring this year matters not just because I missed green and blue and purple and pink and yellow so much--oh, I missed them!--but because so much of my life from December of 2004 through the past few months seems to have been about the winter cycle of dying back for the sake of regeneration.
What it all means... I don't know yet. Fair enough. God will have his little secrets. Life wouldn't be the same without them, I guess :) But of all the verses in all the books in the Bible, here's one of my favorites:
"Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away;
For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone,
The flowers appear on the earth,
And the time of the singing of birds is come..." Song of Solomon 2: 10-12
There are a few winter nights of December that stick out in my mind. Of course, they were the nights of heavy snowfall, when it all came down in thick tufts and made driving conditions extremely hazardous.
ReplyDeleteNext winter I'll have to show you some of the dangerous elegance of winter in Bellingham and we certainly are not going to drive (and end up parking ten miles away from our destination).