2: I'm thankful for Springtime

...and for summer and fall and winter too. I'm glad I live in a place that has four such distinct seasons. As one season wears on, we begin to look forward to the next one. Even winter!

But Spring and Fall have always been my favourites. The transition seasons, you might call them. They're like the secondary hues in the colour wheel of the year. Springtime, with its lovely pastels and autumn with its brilliant fire.

We enjoyed one of those perfect Spring days today. Temperatures in the mid-20s, a clear sky scattered with perfect cotton-ball clouds, and the glorious sight of leaves and flowers emerging into the world from trees and bushes and lawns everywhere you looked.

Sun-hungry colleagues came to work today all golden and sunburnt from being irresistibly drawn outdoors on a weekend that was just as perfect. My mole eyes drank in their glow and reveled in the beauty of sun-kissed cheeks and eyes bright from a day of warm fresh air after the long, dark winter.

Dusk, by Maxfield Parrish

And light. Hail the light! It's almost 9 pm as I write this, and there is still light in the sky. That intoxicating yellow-to-turquoise-to-deep, deep blue that characterized the skies in so many of Maxfield Parrish's paintings. You don't see skies like that in the fall and winter. They seem impossible, the colour of fairy wings and mermaid tails.

When spring first begins in Canada, it's as if we all take a huge, collective breath of air and shrug off the mantle of snow and ice and darkness that has bound us up for the last five months. Spring teases us at first. Peeping out for a day or three in March, sending rivulets of snowmelt running down the streets and making us all go through windshield wiper fluid like a drunken biker goes through beer. And then the snow comes again, and we resume waiting.

The early spring exposes the black, filthy snow in the snowbanks as layer after layer melts away. As it melts, the snow assumes the look of a fantasy mountain range of high peaks and jagged crags, all shining like cyrstals in the sun.

And the smell. At any other time of the year, we'd think it repulsive, laden as it is with the odors of things long-buried and now exposed to sun and light and moisture. Things like dog shit and garbage and old cigarette butts. But over it all is that other smell, that smell that makes our skin tingle in anticipation, makes our eyes shine brighter and our breath come in deep gulping drafts that taste soooo good. The smell of wet, fertile, waiting earth. The smell of opening, of ripening, of the promise of green.

Green! After so long, the colour green intoxicates us. First creeping over the branches of trees like a mist, so faint you wonder if it's really there. A verdant blush that intensifies as the days pass. Every imaginable shade of green, as the trees don their Sunday best, the better to worship the sun and rain, the better to shelter the birds and squirrels that are suddenly everywhere.

It's always said that Springtime is a time of beginning. I never thought of it that way. I think of it as a time of returning. It's the time when nature resumes its proper wardrobe after standing frozen and black and naked all winter. It's the time when life returns to its busy-ness. Bumble bees return to their impossible flight paths, birds serenade each other, and by accident, all of us as well. What more beautiful sound is there, the first time you wake in the dark still hours of an early April morning, than to hear that first spring song flooding across the courtyard, lilting, trilling, calling nature to come back, it's time, it's time!