Spring in Process

Winter is beginning to let go. I crack the window and let the breeze brush my skin. After months of bitter cold, even that feels like a change. Outside, the trees stand bare over brown grass, their limbs piercing the sky while the light falls without finding much to wake. The pool is still covered beneath its faded dark-green tarp, rainwater gathered low in the middle, yellow pollen collecting along the brim. All winter, it has been easier to peer at the yard than step into it. But now something in it is beginning to turn.

First the birds. Then the feeling that the yard is no longer content to stay still. The color is not here yet, but I can feel it somewhere just ahead of me, pressing at the edges. My mind outruns the moment to azaleas, magnolias, petals across the walkway, the whole place softened into the spring I keep wanting. I am already leaning in. All winter I wait, yet its first signs are seldom the ones I want.

The pool is still covered for winter, the tarp stretched loosely across it like an old trampoline. I have not pulled it back. The water beneath is hidden. From the chair by the window, I catch myself daydreaming through the cover toward bare feet on warm concrete, blue water rippling nearby, and blades of grass twitching with grasshoppers.

But the tarp simply will not indulge me. Pine needles collect in the corners. The tears along the seams spread. The middle sags lower and lower until rainwater gathers there, yellow pollen caught around the edge. Even the breeze cannot quite freshen it; the film on top dulls the ripples as soon as they start and the pool is still shut. But spring has already begun to write itself across the surface.

The yellow dust drew my eye outward, and I realized the tarp and concrete had taken on its tint. Even the glass set in the concrete had dulled. The shadow of the house reached across the nearest corner of the pool. Beyond it, the pollen had flattened the concrete’s usual shimmer. The light made the tarp look powdered, while the yellow gathered in the puddle thickened into a bright paste, almost the color of an Easter egg. It was everywhere.

If I stepped outside, the yellow dust would find me too. I looked at the sill beneath the open window, painted with its yellow glaze. It looked less like a ledge than a line being crossed. The open window felt suddenly too open. Then my nose began to tickle. Had it gotten to me now too? I reached up and pulled the window shut. The first signs of spring are hard to keep at a distance.

Yet even this yellow film belongs to the spring I love. I picture the azaleas out front opening in red and purple, the bare maples by the road darkening into red, the Bradford pear scattering its petaled snow across the ground. Then, in a way I never quite catch happening, the yard seems to disappear into color. But it comes only after the yellow haze. For now, my window remains shut, and I wait, annoyed.

I stand with my hands pressed against the window. My eyes fall to the strip of yard between the house and the pool. The Bermuda is still mostly brown, flat to the ground, but the weeds have already pushed up in scattered green stalks, taller than the grass around them. They nod in the wind as if nothing in the yard had ever been dormant. Their green is deeper too, enough to pull the eye before anything else does. Soon enough, they will have my hands in the dirt, pinching stems between my fingers and tugging at roots that never asked whether I wanted them there.

I can already see myself bent over that strip of yard, knees pressed into the dirt. The pile growing beside me, weeds heaped together while loose soil falls back to the ground. In the moment, the pile will look like progress. But I know better. The same feeling was there last year, and now the weeds rise again. The work is all bend, pull, toss, then bend again, until the rhythm begins to wear on me.

And yet, for now, they are the most alive thing I see. Their green stands out against all that brown. Each leaf is smooth, cut by two fine grooves, and when the wind passes through, the stems lean and the leaves go with it. They are not what I want, but they answer spring before anything else in the yard does. I keep looking longer than I mean to. Then I remember the work waiting in their roots.

Then a bee passes in front of the weeds. It floats toward one bloom, hovers there a moment, then moves to another. Eventually it rises to the window and hangs at the glass. For a moment, I step back, forgetting the pane between us. Then I step closer. It drifts along the window, occasionally bumping the glass. My chest tightens at the sound of it pinging against the pane, and at once I remember the piercing pain behind my ear.

A friend and I were bent over scraps of wood, trying to imagine a fort out of what we had. For a while, that was the whole world—boards, dirt, possibility. Then the sting hit behind my ear, sharp and sudden, and the whole little world collapsed.

When I look again, pollen specks its back and I forget to fear. It bobs once, then drifts slowly from right to left, as though the window had become its own strange patch of air. The sting from years ago had felt personal; this moment does not. It hovers a moment longer, drifting from corner to corner before lifting from the glass and disappearing into the yard. The whole encounter had been quieter than my fear allowed. By the time it leaves, I am no longer sure my alarm was the truest thing about it. Fear had made the moment harsher than it was.

Spring returns through yellow haze, dancing weeds, and drifting bees, and still my mind goes racing ahead of it. First the Japanese maples, their deep red leaves and quirky trunks. Then the magnolia, standing over the yard with those almond-shaped leaves. Then everything widening at once—rolling grass, islands of trees, color breaking out wherever the eye lands—until the whole thing starts feeling less like my yard and more like the spring I want at its most complete, something close to Kyoto in cherry-blossom season, paths lined on both sides with bloom, pink petals everywhere. I want to linger there. I want a bench beneath the magnolia, heat on my skin, breeze moving through, time slowed enough to do nothing but sit still and look. But when I come back to the yard in front of me, the beauty is still too unfinished to rest in. It leaves me restless for the spring in full.

This time of year, the bench would only add to my work. It would wear a coat of pollen. Bees would hum around it. A walk through the yard would mean weeds against my shins, itching before I even sat down. I sink back into the corner chair and reach for the mug of tea beside me. Maybe I have never really loved spring as it is, only as I wish it were. I want spring in bloom, not spring in process. Maybe I have never truly loved spring at all, only my idea of it.

What I have been seeing says far less about spring than it does about me. I had taken the season I loved and tried to make it keep the shape I wanted. But the beauty I chose to love only ever arrived through the nuisance I longed to avoid. Life does not arrive in the tidied forms I prefer.

The pollen comes from the very trees I love to watch. The yellow film, the dusty clothes, the stuffed sinuses, even the haze laid over the yard are only the blooms arriving slowly. The weeds sway like the rest of us, clinging to the life they have. The bees still make their small crossings through the air. They still pester, but they are part of the same life stirring through the yard. The pool is still covered, the tarp still sagging beneath its yellow glaze, but I no longer mistake it for delay alone. What I had been calling prelude was spring itself, already here in the yellow haze, the weeds, the bees, and the tarp-sagged pool. Spring has been arriving in forms I did not know how to love. Love is not longing for what could be, but seeing what is.