Another Spring

This becomes a day like any other that is somehow different. Then another and another. Little things. The air feels brighter. The river is lower. Less practical footwear appears on the feet around you.

The mornings are crisp and the pollen hasn’t started yet. The trees still bare though the smaller shrubs turn purple and white. Everything feels fragile but possible again.

It might not last. It’s possible another snow storm is yet to come, but you have to cast your lot with some version of the future.

And then the pollen does start. The world coalesces out of its dream state into great lime green clouds of oak and pecan pollen. A world of runny eyes and burning lungs. It’s awful for a week to ten days. Then the catkins fall in great heaps that mat in the corners of the deck, choke the gutters and require a rake to get out of the yard.

Then the clouds of pollen disappear and you know summer heat is only a week or two away. This is how it goes around here, year after year. It typically starts a bit before calendar spring. I’m not good with dates though. I’m not good with time actually. Unless I have a deadline.

Human are the only ones with deadlines. Spring comes when it comes.

There is the spring equinox. The plane of Earth’s equator passes through the center of the Sun with admirable regularity. It might not mark spring precisely, but from here on out there’s more light in the day than darkness.

If you whip out your stopwatch you’ll notice that the length of day and night aren’t exactly the same, but then if you’re the sort to whip out a stopwatch for holidays probably no one is going to invite your to their equinox party anyway. It’s close enough. It’s something to mark, somehow.

One of the unfortunate side effects of not being religious or subscribing to any particular religion¹ is that you have little to mark. Days and months slide by. Changes proceed largely without us or without our marking them in any way. Secularists don’t have potlucks.

One of the wonderful things about the internet though is that it makes communities possible that would otherwise not be possible. No church to attend every Sunday with the same people? No problem, start a Facebook group². Profit. Or at least potluck.

Which is the world’s longest intro to we went to an equinox party and easter egg hunt with a bunch of fellow secularists. And it was great. There was even old school climbing equipment of the sort children could take real risks on. I’d like to attribute that to the lack of religion present, but that would be stretching it. I think it was just some playground equipment that time forgot.

There was an egg hunt as well, though my children are a bit young to get too into it. They are far more enthralled by the own anticipation of a thing than any thing itself. Actually maybe that’s not something you grow out of, I think I’m the same way. The potluck was good. It had chicken. It marked a thing, a change, or the symbol of a change, that the weather sometimes aligns with, sometimes does not. But it lacked a certain gravitas.

Not that spring has much gravitas. But there is a certain violence to change, even seasonal change, that seems like it’s worth a pause, however brief, to reflect. The snow melts, the rain falls, it all goes somewhere. Water cuts through red Georgia mud. Trees are washed from banks. Rocks tumble down to sand, slow canyons carved a bit more every year as the silt and sand rolls down from the Appalachia to the sea. The mountains themselves are changing, getting smaller, their sides steeper. All this change destroys what came before.

We like to paint spring as something that emerges out of winter, something that grows up from some blankness, and it does from one perspective, but we overlook that it destroys what came before. There is no change without destruction and decay. It’s possible to recast that destruction in pretty words, but it is always destruction, especially from the point of view of what came before. It would be interesting to hear what the caterpillar thinks of the butterfly.

I’m never going to get the collective solemnity of ceremony without religion though. I know that. That sort of gravity comes from larger groups of like minded people than I will ever find, even on Facebook. For now I’ll settle for potlucks.