Risen again

Just in time for Easter, yesterday I spotted the first crocuses of spring, blooming along the leaf-littered edge of the same yard where I’d spotted this year’s first snowdrops. What better metaphor of resurrection do you need than the poking of fresh new flowers out of last year’s dead leaves?

This afternoon, J and I tackled our own portion of last year’s dead leaves: one last batch of autumn that an early snowfall had left buried on J’s yard for the winter. Raking last year’s leaves from under one of J’s shrubs, I found snowdrops blooming there, too, completely buried in leaves. What sort of faith–what kind of tenacity–inspires a flower to bloom without ever having seen the light of day?

Spring in New England feels a bit like that as you move forward toward a season you can’t completely see: “This,” you tell yourself, “is the direction I remember spring as being.” Earlier tonight, our yard-work done, J and I took a sundown stroll and remarked on all the leaf-bags we saw lined in front of neighbors’ houses: on a mild March weekend, everyone’s been out raking and bagging that last batch of hitherto buried autumn. There’s a good deal of faith–a tremendous amount of tenacity–in that endeavor, too: an unspoken hope that if you uncover the cold, winter-blanched earth, the soon-to-be-spring sun will awaken life from the dead.