Spring Sprung

Another season of Skatter Monkey frolics has come to a close and I must celebrate my son's leaving for college.



For the first Saturday in months, I am not rushing to the Mountain at the break of dawn, nor casting myself in exhaustion on the couch at the end of the day. With the time to choose comes sunshine and warmer weather, perfect for a leisurely walk to contemplate horizons before and behind.

Several weeks have passed between essays lately; the pattern seems to have settled in to fits and spurts, words tossed down to articulate a particular window here and there, while a skyscraper of thought and action looms without description.

A biographer fully absorbed in his subject must get overwhelmed by the tiny details that move, sway and dissuade someone towards their ultimate accomplishments. So much more so the autobiographer who has the deeper details, but the clouded vision that inevitably distorts it. For myself, the mere peon with little facts actually accomplished to invite documentation, but plenty of joy, misery and opinion to express, I dance around the details willy nilly and imagine fancifully that somewhere in this mass of words blogged (sometimes ad nauseum as a sister described it), there are little glimmers that illuminate for others a tiny window into their own tall building.

Change of season is always a time of transition. The parents of my monkeys with rolling eyes express no time to rest before soccer and baseball seasons get going and the house at the Cape needs dusting. Others I know simply carry on with their deliveries, just happy to wear shorts instead of face masks.

In Vermont, after months of holding your body tight against the cold, I like to think we have earned our spring. Taking young African refugees to play soccer indoors one winter when it was minus twenty outside, I found no words to reassure their shivering smiles that life would get better, but we certainly danced when that first ball sailed into the high corner of a full-sized net. When I lived in a climate where you had to think if we were headed towards Christmas or away, I felt no where near this kind of ebullience to unzip my jacket.

Little things.

In the light of Japanese devastation and bombs dropping on Libya, my problems seem so small indeed. Someone close has just been diagnosed with cancer and no matter how good the prognosis and fiercely determined he is to fight, my heart aches for the battle he must face. My own surgery looms and takes a toll on my optimism, but all-in-all, life is sweet. The sun is shining. Crocuses are poking out of the rubble that winter has left. The air is bright with promise.

Japan’s disaster has re-enforced the knowledge that it could all change in an instant. The heart-wrenching images of husbands searching then grieving for their wives swept away makes one reach out and pull close those important in our lives. The heroic stories of strangers helping strangers make every down-turned eye on a morning’s walk an opportunity to say hello.

Life is also short.

Right in front of us are things we take for granted. More importantly, beside us are people who give us love and make us mad, but who are still beside us hand-in-hand. Acknowledgement and appreciation go a long, long way. In my life, there are too many to name here, but face-to-face, voice-to-voice, text-to-text, I am trying to be better about letting them know how much they mean to me and how much I care.

Sometimes love is pain. We question if we get enough back for what we give. Because life is so busy and our dreams are so strong, we can miss out. The little flower in our footpath gets crushed before we ever knew it was there.

On this sweet morning (day, evening, night), I invite us all to look around.

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