I love spring. Everything about it is intoxicating and wonderful, even with one of your eyelids glued shut and your sinuses caked thick with a layer of pollen. It’s like passing “Go” on the Monopoly board of life. You don’t automatically collect a hundred bucks, but you feel like it, knowing you get to leave a lot of hardships from winter behind and start all over in a season where beauty abounds and life is how it should be: reborn, fresh, and new.
Another one of my favorite things about spring is weddings. They just seem to go together like Sonny and Cher, peanut butter dipped in chocolate, and sea salt with tequila on a sunny day.
This particular spring seems to be different, though, as if I have passed “Go” so many times in a row without keeping track that I’ve forgotten just how many times I’ve been around the board. That was until I opened up our first wedding invitation of the spring.
“What’s wrong? You look pale,” my husband looks up from his cell, a hint of panic rippling across his forehead as he wrinkles his nose. “Don’t tell me your old college roommate decided to marry that 25 year-old surfer from Ecuador with dreadlocks and a portable herb garden? I give it three months; six months tops.”
“No, it’s worse,” I tell him, though I do admire his optimism. “We‘re invited to a friend’s wedding, but instead of guests of the groom, we are now guests of the groom’s parents.”
“It’s official.” He looks at me with such despair, I’m afraid he might faint, or worse, drop his cell phone into my spaghetti sauce and that’s all we have for dinner.
“I know, hon.” I try to comfort him as best as I can while moving my saucepan to the back burner.
“We’re old.”
I’m not sure how we missed it. Along the way of paying mortgages, utilities, mowing lawns, changing diapers, MacGyver-ing science projects, and attending parent/teacher conferences we became bona fide grownup . . . or old fogies, as we used to call them.
One would think we should have figured all this out much earlier, but who has time to stop and think about such things while you’re right smack in the muck of it all? I will concede we should have caught on when we started to hold menus and price tags two or more feet from our face in order to read them. Not to mention the cacophony of sounds orchestrated by the creaks of our bones and the wheezes from our deviated septa as we toss and turn in bed at night that also might have clued us in. We just aren’t spring chickens anymore.
I was thinking about the stark contrast of the grown up world compared to a child’s world the other day while watching my daughters swim in the pool. It was quite a beautiful sight: the way their arms and legs and strands of long hair seemed to move like silk in between what looked like, from the surface, layers of pale blue water. They appeared as if two ethereal beings, not young, not old, not really of this world, but of a middle place. A place where there is great lightness and buoyancy and beauty; a place totally unaffected by the weight of the water from above or the crushing enormity of the worries of the world resting just above the surface.
Ripples of water slid silently above their submerged bodies. A storm would soon be coming in from the ocean, but in that moment, they didn’t have a care in the world. Why would they? They were completely unaware of everything around them because they were deeply and completely immersed in that moment.
It’s hard to remember how that feels sometimes. The older we get, the more burdens we carry and the more darkness we see where there used to be light. Every day, we see neighbors we love, loved ones we cherish, and people we have never met or had a chance to know suffer from a long list of things beyond their control and we feel helpless about how to make it better.
How can everything around us be so sunny and green and new, when there is hurt and grief and loss just beneath it all?
My dad is a surgeon who has spent four decades face to face with both life and death. He is also the epitome of a modern day Renaissance man and said it best in a poem about spring he wrote many, many years ago and shared with me when I was eighteen. I have carried it with me ever since and whenever I feel weighed down I read it. Here is how it ends:
“And as I survey this world around me, my senses are overwhelmed. But deep in my heart the snow is still deep, the winds blow cold, and the boughs of the Dogwoods hang heavy with ice. Why such contrast, such disharmony? It’s as if my heart lies waiting, still asleep, still dormant but safely tucked away from the elements, but I am forever secure in the knowledge that this too will pass for just as ceaselessly as the seasons change, so too will the Dogwoods and Azaleas bloom for me.”
I’m reminded of my spicy Columbian friend Bert Snyder who has been bravely battling stomach cancer. I wish everyone knew Bert. Many of you do. She has filled up every ounce of her small frame with humor, grace, dignity, and a resilience of spirit. When the doctors recommended another bout of chemo, she said no. For her, it’s about the quality of our time, not the quantity of it, that defines a life lived well.
She told me, “I choose life.” Bien hecho, Bertica. Life it is.
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