Spring

  Springtime had always felt like a beginning for me, even though it is situated in the third month of the year, confirmed or dismissed by an immortal rodent.

  It’s a curious thing, that once I had put my hands on the kitchen counter in order to pull my eyes over the edge. I wanted to see what flowers my mom had put out in honor of the weather. Or maybe simply in honor of allowing herself the pleasure of buying flowers; maintaining their bloom within her own godless power.

There is no certainty in the way that the spring has ever felt, it’s a natural forgetting. The cold is on the back of the throat in the spring, the tip of the tongue in the fall. Winter has its own freakish lingering that I’ve always envied. My mother would often complain of the cold hurting her back. I think everything hurt her back.

  “We got into a car accident with a semi-truck when you were five years old. You don’t remember, but your spine does. My spine does too,” she’d always say.

She was right. The spine has the peculiar responsibility of telling the truth as it hunches, curves, whispers into the back of the neck. It screams in warning when you’ve taken it somewhere it cannot go. It’s trapped; I think that’s what makes it so honest. I think my mom’s spine was always screaming. In the winter, her aching would become unbearable. It felt like someone had molded her out of clay, twisting her all about, leaving her out to dry. Like a wet t-shirt, she dried stiffened.

  April’s wet pavement would soften the clay, surrendering spines and semi-trucks and mother and child to its purgatorial smugness. Harmless is the nature of April.

  Finally, then, the spring would come. The sun would arrive, late but welcomed. The warmth would tease and dance and eventually relent. There, in the teasing and relenting and even in the mistiness of April, is an anticipation. A waiting of sorts. Waiting for myself to become exuberant, lovely. To hoist myself onto the counter, sit on the edge, pluck a flower from the springtime vase. Perhaps it’s not a beginning at all. Perhaps it’s only a pause. A still frame of me in the kitchen in April, the tastes of the seasons lathered generously on my tongue. This photo hangs in my kitchen, now, above the counter.