Spring

I let my mind wander today, and it came home to me bearing a slender branch, heavy with redbuds, in its beak. I looked at that branch for several moments, silent and astonished. Then I lifted up my head and saw that, indeed, spring has come.

There are purple crocuses at the feet of the trees, my dear. There are clumps of pungent chives. The air is pristine and very young, not yet hot with summer's sun, not yet strong with summerstorms' tempestuous passion. It is the breeze of playmates, not of lovers. My trees are bare yet, but their bark is smooth and supple, and green inside with sap. The scent of it has the power to drive me mad with joy.

I took a walk today, away from my Romantic poets. I ought to have found them reflected in the spring, for did they not love spring, and is spring not Romantic? But, to my great joy, I found that spring is older than the Romantics, and is in no way bound to their expressions. While their best work reflects it, it does not reflect them. It is far less self-centered, and maintains even in its excesses a restraint, a gravity, and almost a grief, which their expostulations know not.

I broke a long twig from a fallen branch, on my walk, and swung it in my hand, and scraped the earth, and found that I am only twelve years old, not twenty-four. I remember now that when I was fourteen I wrote a letter to myself, to be opened in my twenty-fourth year. I wonder if I have that letter still... I wonder, but I care little. I remember what was in it, and the questions asked by my fourteen-year-old self were--not to put too fine a point on it--rather silly. In another person I would show consideration, but since it is only myself, I will not look for the letter or think of it. I will be twelve, not twenty-four, and different from my self at twelve only in being wiser than I was, and less inclined to nonsense of that sort.

But in the nonsense of spring, which is not nonsense at all, I will wisely revel. Spring is all to me. In April I become more than happy; for that month I am radiant. The days are too short, in April, and the nights too short also. I am in love with every hour. It is a month that answers all my wishes, for it is sad and gay, melancholy and furious, funny, kind, sweet, and above all hopeful and loving. In April I am ruled by April.

It is no accident, to my mind, that April follows immediately upon Easter. I imagine to myself that spring begins with Christ's passion, and that all the angry rainful days of March are the groanings of the passion, and that the glorious morning of Easter Sunday is the first true spring morning, and that after that the whole history of the church can be chronicled in a rising crescendo of things bursting into bloom. Then I think to myself how rich a harvest the autumn of the world will bring, and it seems to me that even the perishing of Earth, in a blaze of fire as rich as red maple leaves, will be magnificent, because after that there shall be no winter, but rather an entirely new season, which leaves my imagination breathless.

Meanwhile, Easter. By now, on that day so many years ago, Jesus would have been in His tomb, perhaps. By now, had I been a disciple then, my heart would be shattered. I would walk in bewilderment about the streets, neither knowing nor caring where I went, aware only of an absolute despair. I would feel, I am sure, that the sun could not ever rise again. Had it not been blacked out when He gave up His last breath? And moreover, I would not want it to shine more on a world that had not Him in it. By now, I would be standing idly, swaying and empty and spent from tears, in the middle of a dusty alley, perhaps, wondering that the dogs still barked and the children still laughed. These things would seem to me unnatural.

If you told me, tonight, then, that I would know joy again... I would only shake my head and stare. So, just for tonight, as I do every year, I will live it over again. He is gone, gone, gone, and I am desolate, though every now and then my heart throbs with a mad hope. For, after all, he raised others from the dead. Is it possible that....?