The apple trees are blooming again. Ditto the daffodils;
same with the hyacinths. Great thunderclouds of pollen are once more billowing out
from every tree on Earth to reconvene in my sinuses. That one #%#!@ dandelion
is back to taunt me. The whole showery, flowery refrain of Spring is chirping
along with the birds at full tilt. Our hemisphere has wobbled back to face the
sun, and all the garden and nature beyond are conspiring to make us believe the
world is the same place it was a year ago. As if, from one Spring to the next,
nothing really changes. As if starting over was the same as never ending.
But it’s not.
The seasons would have us marvel how they bring us back
around each year. How each Spring, the same flowers bloom, the same fledgling
birds stumble from their nests. They ask us to trace the line of their circle
and cry “Infinity!”, forgetting, of course, as seasons do, that while trees may
bloom every year, the same flower never emerges twice. Those are not the same
birds fledging; they are just more birds.
We may stagger and spin along with the planet, we may turn
our faces to the warmth of the returning sun, but we do not live on the endless
line of a circle. Ours is rather the bounded space within, where air and time
and luck are not replenished. Once any of these is exhausted, we either stop
spinning altogether, or are hurled off to trace another line whose shape we
can’t comprehend. Life itself goes on, goes around again, for however many
seasons it may, and there is comfort to be found there. But we ourselves have
only the one season that is a life.
Our life.
Because we are not the apple tree, the perennial bearer
whose cycles mirror the seasons indefinitely. We do not get another Spring. Each
of us is but a single blossom. This is our one chance to unfurl and flower, to
sing in scent for the bees, to grow within us whatever fruit may follow and
then drop, spent, to ground. None of us knows how long we have on the branch,
which perching bird or gust of wind will cast us off. But we do know the season
can’t last forever.
One year ago, the sun’s angle in the sky as it dawned
outside my window was about the same as it is now. The day would have been as
long. But as far as I’m concerned, this is where the resemblance ends. Because
one year ago I woke to the news that shuddered up and down my soul and hasn’t
stopped since. It shouts from a cave in my chest and runs loose in dreams and
idle moments and stolen memories.
My brother is gone.
How could anything be the same, ever again?
No, the world is different now. And in truth, it is so with every
passing moment for every person on Earth. So much can change in the space of a
heartbeat, in a morning glance towards a phone with suddenly too many messages.
How much more becomes strange and unrecognizable from Spring to Spring? No
chance realignment of the Earth and its star could change this. No periodic
confluence of cherry blossoms and chickadees could reassemble the petals fallen
in seasons past.
What these things can do is remind us.
This is our one life, our one and only season here, our one
bloom.
So make yours beautiful.
