spring

It is an early March morning. Daylight savings time has begun. You can spend all the daylight you want and yet the sun is never spent. The sun’s cup overfloweth. The stars, like economies, have cycles of boom and bust too.

The monarchs are here and the birds’ chirping has turned from autumnal dirges to bright spring exuberance. The morning breeze through the open windows is cool and carries the ocean with it. The air is boundless and salted.

The season’s changing feels like an achievement. The winter air still hangs in the back of the house: dark, wet, and mineraled, as if it had risen from the depths of the damp earth.

I spent the prior winter with someone grieving the loss of a loved one. This particular grief unfolded in a perfect, almost textbook manner. The loss of the loved person, followed by a searingly personal pain that pulses into something more universal; guilt and its cessation; internalization of the lost person’s good qualities; a clearness of a life that loss has pierced, and the ensuing ability to peer through that wound and into the coursing bloody completeness at the core of it all.

From that core, the lost person froths forth into the world in altered forms: here the smell of linden blossoms and cut grass, there a thin gold chain, now a memory of a blue jaguar, then the smell of old and loved leather bags. I am speaking of memory. I am also speaking of life.

Life is the narrow place where the past transforms. In the first days of spring, I remember the winter. In falling in love, I remember everyone I have lost. In remembering, despair becomes loss, loss becomes transformation, and memory enfolds us all gently like the wings of those birds on the first days of spring.