It is spring at my parents’ house. I drove down a few days ago to spend Easter weekend with them, and although most trees still lack leaves, the familiar sunshine and blue sky and bird calls that make up the particular spring of my childhood backyard seem to have neatly flipped the switch of seasons and turned off winter.
I have a new kind of energy, I feel good in my clothes, I’ve eaten vegetables and walked barefoot in grass. I like going home.
In previous years, spring has been the end of exam seasons, an open window and friendly breeze that feel miraculous and luxurious after a winter in Michigan. It’s been graduations and lockdown and asking my mom to remind me the names of the trees on our street.
It’s the kind of thing that can feel cheesy to read about. You know the kind of thing…
Ah, spring
Blessed gift of light and green
Wee chickees and tuft’d bunns
New growth and life and so on, and yada, etc.
But experiencing it each year really does feel inspirational and… sensational. In the literal sense that my senses are engaged, in ways it seems like they haven’t been for months, numbed without my notice.
Spring has also been March Madness—when it starts getting warm again and my family spends the most time on couches in front of TVs all year. But we sit in the room with all the windows and take breaks to walk to the park and grill bratwurst on the back patio, at least by the later rounds. And then it’s the Masters, with its Easter colors—bright green grass and pastel polos—and announcers kindly whispering their commentary while I slowly wake up from my Sunday nap.
Spring has been a mix of things, layers of memories, and sounds, and foods, and the bright citrus shock of life from now-unabashed sunshine and cold-blue-turned-friendly-blue skies.
I can’t quite hear spring showers in my middle-floor apartment and the view from my room is a parking lot rather than my mother’s garden with a pear tree in bloom. The few scraggly plants on my balcony aren’t quite the yard where we played wiffle ball enough to wear out a home plate of dirt or the swing set I’d hide on top of during slumber party flashlight tag.
But I’ll drive north and east from my parents’ house and it will be spring along the highway. I’ll see rows of redbud trees and even patches of daffodils as I inch past tractor trailers. The brown of the mountains will be slowly melting away and the sun will wait to set until I’m a bit closer to my bed.
So even I can’t help but write this kind of thing…
Ah, spring
Blessed gift of life and green
Christina Ribbens (’19) graduated with a major in history and minors in studio art and data science. After working in campus ministry for a few years, she’s getting her master’s in public humanities at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. She has a benevolent dependency on tea, is always down for a game of pick-up basketball, and would love to have you over for pancakes sometime.
