Spring Running
It's a strange thing, but the first week of May, right on up to around the 12th or 15th or so, has always been unusually evocative for me.
It isn't necessarily even connected with some major event, like Jim proposing, which of course put a mythic longing and achingly reminiscent spin on the first week of May forever. Could just be a cool, windy, rainy day, with the new ridiculously green leaves and the white blossoms on the pear trees all flying.
But there's something about the quality of the air, and the way it smells and feels, as it transitions from one season to the next, that just sandbags me, buckles my knees, the freshness of it, and the light, that gets me every time. Makes me want to weep, and also exalts me clean out of myself.
Even when I was a kid. As some of you may have noticed from reading my books, I'm a big fan of weather and seasons. Right up there with jewelry and hair. And it isn't just spring that can haunt me right there in the middle of itself.
Autumn does the same, even better; and winter, only different of course. It's only summer that doesn't grab me the same way, mainly because I hate the heat and humidity. But even summer can do it: an afternoon with a thunderstorm on the way, everything all hot and thick and waiting, the leaves are so thick and green they smell like milk. And then when the storm finally hits, the gaspingness of it, the smell of the rain on hot stone pavement or roads, the wind that's like a slap in the face.
But these few middle weeks of spring are to me the most poignant, damn near unbearable, as they change and slip away for another year. And I just felt like talking about it.
(I hope at least one or two fellow Kipling fans caught the title...)
It isn't necessarily even connected with some major event, like Jim proposing, which of course put a mythic longing and achingly reminiscent spin on the first week of May forever. Could just be a cool, windy, rainy day, with the new ridiculously green leaves and the white blossoms on the pear trees all flying.
But there's something about the quality of the air, and the way it smells and feels, as it transitions from one season to the next, that just sandbags me, buckles my knees, the freshness of it, and the light, that gets me every time. Makes me want to weep, and also exalts me clean out of myself.
Even when I was a kid. As some of you may have noticed from reading my books, I'm a big fan of weather and seasons. Right up there with jewelry and hair. And it isn't just spring that can haunt me right there in the middle of itself.
Autumn does the same, even better; and winter, only different of course. It's only summer that doesn't grab me the same way, mainly because I hate the heat and humidity. But even summer can do it: an afternoon with a thunderstorm on the way, everything all hot and thick and waiting, the leaves are so thick and green they smell like milk. And then when the storm finally hits, the gaspingness of it, the smell of the rain on hot stone pavement or roads, the wind that's like a slap in the face.
But these few middle weeks of spring are to me the most poignant, damn near unbearable, as they change and slip away for another year. And I just felt like talking about it.
(I hope at least one or two fellow Kipling fans caught the title...)
posted by Patricia Kennealy Morrison | 9:35 PM
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