The Thing About Spring

The only bad thing about spring is that it leads to summer.

For some reason, summer has been, for me, “the time when everything bad happens”.  I can look back at each of the past four summers and name something particularly stinky about each one:  the ending of a ministry, the death of a grandmother, the death of a father, and – well, we just won’t go there on the last one, but it was stinky enough.   Go back a little farther in the summers, and I can find more fun things.  Drama and upheaval and depression, oh my! Oh, look, there’s the Postpartum Depression That Ate My Soul, July 1996! Good times!

…All this to say, I am a bit counter to the culture in greeting the springtime with mixed feelings.  I love the sun-kissed blue skies, warming weather, buds and blossoms, and morning birdsong as much as anyone else; but even as these things enliven my soul, they also awaken within it a sort of primeval dread.  Subconsciously, I am tensing, bracing, asking myself through clenched teeth:  what now? I have been “taught” by past experience to expect something dreadful, lurking just around the corner on the other side of May.

When I get a little too tense, I have to stop and remind myself that good things have happened in the summertime, too.

I was ordained in July of 2002.   Ordination was, and is, a bright mystery that I am still only just beginning to live into and understand.  To quote the unicorn from Peter S. Beagle’s book:  “No sorrow will live in me as long as that joy.”

I spent two summers pregnant, and while those summers were no picnic, they were also profoundly and mysteriously beautiful.  Wouldn’t wanna do it again, but I’m so glad I had that gift, twice over.

Many of my “snapshot memories” center around summer.  The beach.  Amusement park pleasures.  Nature’s intricate beauty.  The simple sweetness of ice cream shared with friends and family at dusk.   Sun on tree leaves.  Children playing.   Plants and earth, cool beneath my hands.  Friends and family visiting.  Life, moving at the speed of life.

When I stop to think about it, the good things about summer outweigh the bad.  And, dreadful as the bad stuff is, and dread-full as my heart can be at times, I gotta admit:  every bad thing of every summer past either resolved itself, worked out somehow, or else – if nothing else – became a little more bearable with time.

Or will.

The only bad thing about spring is that it leads to summer.  But even the worst of summers has a way of leading, sooner or later, to another spring.

~ by Just Tracy on April 17, 2009.