i never knew and neither did you
and everybody never breathed
quite so many kinds of yes… — e.e. Cummings

There is something about spring that I’ve never quite been able to put my finger on. Here in the northeast, the fact that we experience the four seasons is a given, and we move from one to other quite effortlessly, though not at times without some griping. We complain about the heat and humidity in summer and the encroaching cold nights in the fall. And then there’s winter, the season with which many of us have a love-hate relationship. But spring? Who has ever complained about spring?

No one would argue that it does carry with it its own particular set of annoyances. At times, it just doesn’t seem to want to, well, spring! It dawdles and teases, slipping back into its predecessor’s mode with a surprise April snowfall or freezing rain. Crocuses and other spring flowers shiver in early morning temperatures that are just above the freezing point, and birds still fluff out their feathers to stay warm. Then, when it looks like that’s all behind us again and the peepers are finally peeping, the black fly arrives to make sitting outside a nightmare for a few weeks.

Yet, deal with it all we do, because it is, well, spring! It’s what we’ve longed for since last September, and finally, it’s here again. No matter how often one has experienced it, it never loses its luster. And as the poet so lyrically puts it, there is nothing negative about it or about how we approach it.

A couple of mornings ago, I awakened early after a rainy night to that smell in the air that belongs only to spring, of things burgeoning, of tiny green shoots popping up from the soil, displacing its billions of particles and releasing their own rich aroma in the process. For what gardener has ever lived who hasn’t picked up a handful of soil and taken in the scent of that which feeds all that grows around us?

Our love of spring is such a complex thing and is not unrelated to all that is happening around us. For we are burgeoning and blooming, too, emerging from our winter complacency to a new and refreshing urgency, our days slowly taking on the color we were deprived of those many cold and dreary months. The fair-weather periods are in short shrift here in this part of the world, for their forecasts can turn on the proverbial dime. So we cherish them all the more and are all the sadder when the year wanes and The Season That Shall Not Be Mentioned is upon us once again.

For now, it’s all about enjoying the lengthening days, the more direct and warmer sunshine, the tree boughs heavy with buds bursting at their seams, the birds with their happier notes, and even the rain that rinses the earth hereabouts of its last winter vestiges. It’s about watching squirrels running up and down tree trunks with mouthfuls of leaves for their nests and Tom turkeys jousting for the attention of the hens. It’s about the goldfinch couple taking turns at the birdfeeder, while the male Mallard duck waits patiently beneath it as the female fattens herself on the droppings.

Spring is, as the poet so aptly puts it, that time when the energy that drives everything around us compels us as well. It is when we can step outside again, minus a shovel or scraper, and breathe a different air, a sweeter lighter one, and think or perhaps even say loud enough for the whole world to hear: “Yes, oh yes!”