The Easter Spell

A few years ago we planted azaleas in front of our house in Winedale. By themselves, they sing the season in a harmonic chorus of pinks and whites outside the window. I listen all day long from my desk.

Then there are the bluebonnets, this year outnumbering all other seasonal wild companions in our yard.

They have turned what once was a bed of roses into an unexpected bower of blue, almost knee high, spilling into the area where I have my vegetable boxes.

This is the first time I’ve seen azaleas and bluebonnets reach their peaks together. And I’m grateful for the celebration— the floods of color in the landscape that accompany a damp and early spring.

In some ways I find this to be the most intensely human of our seasons in Texas. It lifts hearts and can break them.

Other seasons tilt more to breakage, alone—the searing heat of summer, the sadness of fall’s unleafing, winter’s bonedeep chill.

March, so often variable, declared itself unequivocally on the side of spring this year with its Antique Shows and Easter.

And, also, yes, its Easter Spell.

That’s the term writer Leon Hale used to describe a period of surprising cold that arrives annually around Easter, following a slew of warmer days.

The shock of its chill demands notice. Reminds us of nature’s power to push us sideways. At least cause us to grab a sweater or that windbreaker we almost put away.

The heart feels it, too, the touch of cold fingers—or at least mine does.

Because three years ago, as March unfurled outside our windows, my beloved Hale was dying.

We were a somewhat unconventional household. Nothing speaks to that more clearly than how two books of ours were published the day before he went into hospice care.

They were our pandemic project. We had worked on them through most of that strange period of isolation.

Three weeks later, he was gone.

And despite his great age and severe illness, factors that should have prepared me, I was flattened. For months, a husk of me drifted through each day’s chores and responsibilities.

Writing was where I lived, then, writing about him, about how we began—the difficulties our surface differences seemed to create and the wonders that told us to take the risk. I wanted to put him on the page where I could watch him as he had been, youthful at sixty and so many years thereafter.

I needed that. To see him, hear him once more as he had been. Creating what approximates a movie in your own mind is one of the miracles of writing. And in the grip of grief, truly I didn’t do much else.

I couldn’t read—unless it was a bedtime mystery or one of Hale’s own books. I couldn’t be depended on beyond my presence at the computer, typing, researching, every day until I was too tired to continue.

And so now, in this glorious spring of 2024, in the midst of a pretty typical Easter Spell (forty degrees this morning on our porch) comes the result, a memoir entitled “This Familiar Heart, An Improbable Love Story.”

It’s our story, his and mine, about our complicated courtship, our happy life together, and the unexpected discoveries that grief reveals for the surviving spouse.

I’ll talk about it and sign books on Sunday, April 21, Round Top Family Library, 2 p.m. For other events, locally and in Houston: www. winedalebooks.com/events.

The book will be available after April 2 at bookstores and online, and in the office of the Fayette County Record. Readers can contact Hale at bfhale2017@ gmail.com