Springtime

Last week, I was walking to the barn to feed the horses. The morning was so beautiful, it felt like a stab to my heart and I suddenly knew Spring was my favorite season. This surprised me. For decades, Autumn was my choice. What had changed? Or, what had changed in me?

As a kid, my favorite season was summer. I suspect that is true for most of us. No school, running around in the neighborhood, free time, ice cream. What’s not to like?

When I became older, Fall became my favorite. The colors, the crispness in the air, that special autumnal light in the late afternoon. Taking a hike in the woods on a brisk autumn day was just about heaven for me. It stayed that way for decades.

Spring can be unpredictable weather wise, with warm days trading off with freezing temperatures at night. It’s a season that doesn’t like to get ahead of itself and has a bit of a stutter-step start to it.

Still, on that morning last week walking to the barn, it hit me all at once. Spring was suddenly important to me. I almost felt reverential about it. I’ve thought about it since then and asked myself, why?

I think there are many reasons. After a grey, monochrome winter, the world was suddenly in technicolor. The flowers and plants were blooming. The progression from hellebores to crocuses to daffodils to tulips to azaleas was taking place. The grass was changing from brown to a lush green. The trees had mostly started their progression from naked to pale green, to dark green. The redbuds and dogwoods provide their bursts of color, not only at the farm, but lining the road to town.

For me, all of this talked to the rebirth of life and our awareness of it. When we go from fall to winter, everything dies off, either literally, or figuratively. But in spring? Both nature and we come alive again. Reawakened. Rejuvenated. Reborn. If you are a Christian, yes, Christ’s resurrection is tied with Passover, but is it also any wonder that it is in springtime?

Of course, this is nothing new. So, why am I suddenly aware of and affected by all of this? I am not sure, although in the back of my mind, there is something niggling at me. Last week, I also turned 71. I am not an old man, but certainly not young and there are fewer years ahead of me, than behind me. Am I subconsciously yearning for my youth, or something else in my life, and a beautiful spring morning touched at it?

 Maybe.

And maybe it was just a beautiful spring morning in the Virginia Piedmont and nothing more.

 I don’t know. Perhaps by this fall, I’ll be back to autumn as my favorite season, but I’m not so sure about that. The feeling I had last week looking towards the barn in that early morning light was visceral. I don’t remember that happening on any fall day, no matter how beautiful.

Actor Robert Duvall, a long-time Fauquier County resident, famously described the Virginia Piedmont as “the next stop before Heaven.”  I don’t know what heaven is like, or feels like, but last week that Spring morning was so beautiful my heart ached. 

 Addendum:

• The two photos in this blog are from that morning. They don’t do the beauty justice, but were as close as I could get to capturing it.