Spring in my step

The crocuses have faded, and the branches of the forsythia are still bare, but the hellebore is blooming in its shy, unobtrusive way. We’re in what New Englanders call “mud season.” The poet e. e. cummings more happily called it “Just-spring,” when the world is “mud-luscious” and “puddle-wonderful.”

On Tuesday afternoon, I sat outside at my favorite café and ate lunch. The bare branches of a crabapple arched overhead. All around me, people shoved tables and chairs into patches of warm sunlight. There were babies and dogs. Yes, we wore masks to order food and dragged our tables six feet apart. But when I borrowed the unused half of a table from a woman sitting with a friend, she said, “It’s the first time we’ve been out for a year!” Her smile was dazzling.

I felt the same way. It was so ordinary, in some ways. I was just waiting for lunch, outside on a sunny day in early spring, listening to a mockingbird run through its standard playlist of birdsongs. I sipped coffee while I drafted the opening handout for the class on War and Peace I’ll be teaching in the fall (thoughts on the translations, the films, the main characters, that infernal opening scene at a cocktail party). The food, when it arrived, was delicious.

It felt almost normal. And almost normal felt amazing.

We’re still a long ways from normal, of course, and it’s hard to be sensible while we wait. Plus, my allergies are going nuts (as they always do this time of year), and the bears are stirring (which means we’re just about to lose another bird feeder).

Still, I wish you some moments of quiet, radiant joy as we inch towards normal. As Vonnegut–not a man to be falsely cheery–reminded us, “I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’”