In a World with Spring

Imagine that the leaves have fallen. The trees are dead, stripped to spindly, ghostly tentacles. The sun rarely shines, but even the light is cold on your face. When you emerge from your house, the wind lashes you like fleas biting skin. The days are long but the nights longer. And it’s in those nights, in the darkness, the ever-pressing, all-encompassing lack of sight, that you first feel despair.  Over time, winter steals the memory of warmth. You forget the sight of golden light glistening across living branches. Forget the smell of thunderstorms and the sounds of living creatures. The taste of sweet lemonade.  Wrapped in the dark, the cold, and the silence, you believe, This is all that ever was and all that ever will be.  And then one pre-dawn morning, your eyes still closed, you hear the song of returning birds. You step outside your door, and the air smells different—like rain and cut grass and your grandmother’s garden shed. That smell of rich soil is ironically the smell of bacteria eating away the dead things of winter. But these trees, they were never dead, merely sleeping. And as their branches unfurl into green leaves and pink blossoms, […]

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