I just had a flash of the journals I kept right after high
school – with rainbow colored pens, very “daily life,” childish, diary-like. I
don’t think I even admitted things in those pages like my fears about college.
I think those journals must’ve been so superficial that even I couldn’t stand
them. They have long ago vanished: the marking-penned drivel of my nineteen
year old self.
It is springtime here…just the barest beginnings:
daffodils in somebody’s yard;
magnolia tree in bloom in somebody else’s;
gentle hued flowers on the apple trees in the median of a
major road;
and the already-leafing of some of the trees that have stood
like ashy silhouettes against the darker landscape of wintertime.
I imagine even the fields are a touch greener – perhaps the
sprouts of crops that will flourish later? Or just my imagination? Or perhaps
some weeds that took advantage of winter’s rains?
I enjoyed the sound of the pounding rain on the roof, the
wide slaps of water leaking through the screened porch roof onto the cement
slab of ground.
I giggled at the sudden pea-sized hailstorm that quickly
came and passed just as we headed out the door to walk the dog.
I soaked in the textured brilliant colors of sunset against
countless cloud configurations, watching it all shift and transform while we
honored it in our pulled-over vehicle en route to the grocery store.
Yesterday’s writing was really a powerful experience. Maybe
I’ll get to more of it today. For now, I’m just trying to get this pen to
continue across the page and, undeterred, to find the deeper voice that is
within me – waiting, ready to speak out.
What are the seasons in this new place? I’m north of a
nearly seasonless place where sunshine reigns and rain rarely stays. I’m south
of the place I lived for years where the once-in-a-while sunshine calls even
the curmudgeonly face to crawl up in a smile, and rain reigns but in soft
swirls of wetness rather than the torrents of this new midway place. I never
got wet in that most northerly place, even after hours in the persistent soft
drizzle. But here, what am I to expect? Flowers are a’bloom, a few leafing
trees stand in proud contrast to the many still-naked ones. And the temptation
of summertime shorts during the daytimes’ 60s makes a mockery of me at sunset
when the forecast tells me the nighttime temperatures will plummet to half
their daytime high. Do I wear wool or cotton? Two shirts or one? A jacket or
raincoat or umbrella to bat off the hail balls? A thirty-year resident of this place told us a
month ago not to be made fool of by the “two weeks of warm sunshine in
February.” It will change back to wintertime temps and spring will still be a
few corners down the road.
How do I work with quality and time constraints?
Where do my hands pressed down on the warmed green grass
foretell of progress on the writing project – not the journaling in bright colors
of my youth, but the black and white, Times New Roman, 12 font ruminations of
my middle-agedness?
The springtime is an ecotone, a shifting landscape both
outside of me and within. My writing is the ecotone between voice and
experiences, between emotion and evocation. I carefully watch what happens in
nature so that I can pay attention to what’s happening within me. Nature is not "that," is not different or separate from me. We are the springtime. Happening.
Blooming, some parts of us leafed out and others still lying like quiet shadows
in the not-anymore-winter-but-not-quite-springtime of this life.
All blog photographs taken by Jennifer J. Wilhoit unless otherwise noted.
