The Cold is Called Winter
As a child, I don’t remember once noting the ritual graying of the sky or greening of the earth. I don’t remember wishing it were warm when it was cold or cold when it was warm. Maybe this is because I lived on Georgia’s pregnant belly, a straight line from her arched back to the coast, where leaves never changed colors. Maybe it was too hot there for seasons.
Usually spring is the end of winter—more sigh of relief than celebration. This year spring is something new entirely; I have loaded it with every birthing and blooming cliché it can bear. I have spent $400 on flower seeds, warming mats, UVB lights. I have tended to zinnia and celosia shoots like infants, rotating their trays toward the sun, plugging and unplugging heat sources. I water my seedlings with an olive oil dispenser, one drop at a time.
I remember the day in elementary school I learned about seasons. The teacher used one of those laminated posterboards: a spiked summer sun, a magenta flower with cocaine eyeballs, orange and brown maple leaves suspended against a white mid-air. I remember the blue knitted mittens, exotic accessories, and wondering where such a thing might be necessary.
Can you imagine now, needing to be told that Tuesday followed Monday, that autumn was fall, that fall followed summer? The earth is round, they said, and you are standing on it! They told us this on a Wednesday like any other—but now spinning—and then said, “Off to recess!” I can’t remember the blankness of childhood, what must have felt like floating.
Or maybe I am still gathering life’s basic facts, piecing reality together inside a kindergarten mind.
I remember, “In like a lion, out like a lamb” and “April showers bring May flowers.” My first poems.
Last weekend, I bought baby chicks at the Tractor Supply store next to a drive-thru Popeye’s. We already owned a brooder and a couple bags of pine shavings from raising pandemic chicks. Those chickens were a year and a half old when they were shredded like pillowcases by a raccoon, their feathers littering our yard like the aftermath of a tween slumber party. The kids and I needed to witness a couple more springs before we could bear to start again.
The new chicks are in the basement, six of them. As soon as I get home, keys still in hand, I crack the door at the top of the stairs to hear their peeping. It reminds me of when the children were babies, and I listened for their breathing, those savage, splendid springs.
The kids are older now. Last night, I dreamed my husband let our eleven-year-old take his car, the other three kids in the backseat as she drove down one-way streets in a town that wasn’t ours.
When spring turns to summer, I will be forty years old. In a poem by Elizabeth Bishop, a child beholds foreign images in a 1918 issue of National Geographic, then chants her own name to keep herself from falling off the world. She suddenly wonders: “How had I come to be here?”
I bought packets of wildflower seeds, hundreds and hundreds of nascent annuals and perennials I’ll scatter in the yard in two more weeks. I trimmed leaves from the pothos plants in my living room, sinking the cut stems into clear water in glass jars. Every day, at the kitchen window behind the sink, I check for new roots.
I tote entire flats of local strawberries home from the market. Some I pass out to strangers in the parking lot.
When we are children, we take seasons for granted. Now I wonder if, like me, spring is capable of forgetting.
While I can, I am trying to fill my life with life.
