Sign of Spring

I couldn't wait to leave my hometown until I came back after my first year of college. It was leaving and returning that gave this place roots in my heart. But despite those roots, I still don't think of this area as also being the stem, leaves, and flower. I still don't really know where "home" is for me at this point in my life story, or even at which part of the plant (to stick with the previous metaphor) I am just now.

If home is where you keep your stuff, then this is definitely home. And if home is where you spent your childhood, I’m in the right place. The garden swing by the back fence hangs from the same metal frame that we once called the swing set, but the sliding board and gymnastic rings are long since gone. So is the sandbox, which was overgrown years ago by the tenacious trumpet vine planted by previous owners. I wonder how many little green army men are still buried in that dirt, forever entwined in the roots of the trumpet vine.

Those memories of childhood are asleep now, cuddled under a thick blanket of snow, and I’m glad. In a few months, the snow will melt and water the ground, go up into the roots and trunks and stems of the plants and burst open the buds on the trees and flowers. The grass, crushed by the snow and ice all winter, will suddenly spring up, bright green, vibrant, and ready to be mown.

I dread the spring.

In the past month or so, I’ve sort of gotten used to my dad being gone. His absence from the house is still felt, but it’s getting more normal each day. Each morning, we wake up to a clear driveway thanks to the kindness of neighbors and their snowblowers. We get fewer phone calls for his business on our answering machine each day as more and more clients realize the truth. Not having Dad in the wintertime is starting to be emotionally acceptable.

But when the snow is gone and our wonderful neighbors begin mowing the lawn instead of plowing the snow, when I can sit on the garden swing and look over the verdant lawn toward the sprouts in the vegetable garden, when my mom and I have to waterproof the wooden garden fence and deck that my dad built so many years ago when we first moved in ... when we decide where we want to scatter his ashes ... I wonder if grief will be as compatible with that season as it is with this.

Yet even as I sit on the garden swing, now in shadow from the sun which has just dipped beyond the mountain behind me, I gaze east over our yard, past the vegetable garden, over the neighbor’s yard and over the next valley. My neighborhood is in a brown shadow now, but a thin band of yellow and pink trees glows on the next hill. Beyond them, black tree trunks blend with the white snow to make a crest of gray, and beyond that, an azure mountain, reflecting the full glories of a setting sun I can no longer see.

In this terrain that feeds the roots of my life story, I am given hope. The sun may have set for now on my yard, but it still shines brightly on a distant mountain.