Spring is
here finally, and with it comes new beginnings.
This is
the time of year that many people start their gardens, and if you ask anyone with a
green thumb they’ll tell you there’s a right way and a wrong way to prepare
your soil, to plant seeds; there are rules about fertilizer and water and sun and
shade. There’s a good time and a bad time they’ll say, as though time is ever
anything but a gift.
I think
this spring is particularly evocative because of how brutal and relentless the winter
was, how dark, and cold, and lonely its occupation. For me, grief was my stony
companion throughout those grey months, and it often filled the empty side of
my bed. It asked me to spend the day with it, to wrap us both in wrinkled
sheets and listen to the rain perpetually peppering the roof. Sometimes, I did.
In a
little over a month, my estranged husband and I will have been separated for a
year, and will be eligible to file for divorce. Just the words “separation” and
“divorce” sound so sharp and sudden, like a limb cleaved from a body. But for
me, it has been more like a gradual dismantling, little pieces tearing with
each step we took towards being incomplete. We lost a fragment when we stopped
touching; another when he began sleeping in another room. More broke off when
he moved out of our house, and continued later when we finally made it all public− we’d
kept the crumbling secret for so long. Something even larger tore away when I
finally moved out too, and it took some of my soft flesh with it. Because of this,
the pain has been gradual as well, coming in stages and waves. I know that’s
typical, but it didn’t make it any less startling when I found them upon me.
Sometimes,
you do everything right, and the flowers still die; you care too much, drown them in nourishment and they never fully leave the soil. The carrots, neatly
spaced, still wind like tumors around each other, and once pulled into the light reveal
their deformities. You bury the stems of the tomatoes deep, cage them, and water
regularly, but they rise up as shrunken heads, wrinkled and diseased. And yet at other times, you toss a
rotten pumpkin carelessly onto compost, and from the unsuspecting seeds pop bright, plump descendants.
Life is
unpredictable, and I doubt I’ll ever say with certainty that I know what I’m
doing. But right now I’m so very grateful for this April sunshine, and for my
ability to believe in something again. I’m in awe of my heart’s capacity to
adapt and heal, and it’s a gift I refuse to squander. Because soon, it will be
winter again− we all have our own winters that come and go. And I’m determined
to make the most of this spring I’ve been blessed with, and to let life astonish me with it's miraculous resurrection− to breathe in fresh
earth, to listen to the birds croon, and to fall in love again if that’s the
path my heart is determined to take me down. This year I will be green shoots,
and under the long-awaited warmth I will stop bending, and let myself blossom as Mother Nature intended.
There is
no right time or wrong time, there is only springtime and wintertime, summer
and fall. And I am determined to be unapologetically true to myself through them all.
