Spring Thoughts

Spring is so noisy. Have you noticed?

No, I don’t mean the noise you hear with your ears. I mean visual noise: The daily green unfurlings of tiny leaves, tiny stems in the midst of brown winter grass; the wash of green along limbs of every deciduous tree.

You drive along the backroads of Fayette and Washington Counties with a celebration underway on all sides. And this is well before wildflower season arrives.

These are the early green days of spring, when a cold snap— the Easter Spell—remains probable. But life is impatient to return: Bird life, cow life, the life of hidden wild animals in the brush. Our lives.

Along the backroads, it’s a banner year for dewberry blooms snuggling up to fence lines. We know better than to expect equivalencies of fruit, but promise lives in the flower.

I’ve grown interested in a red-shouldered hawk that I see every day on the wire along Klatt Road near Winedale. There are two stock tanks nearby, one of them a shallow, decorative one popular with egrets and herons.

From that wire, the hawk can command four grassy fields with her laser eyes. And I’m watching when she soars off her perch and swoops toward prey she has spotted across the road. The trajectory of her flight is an artistic expression as clean and clear as any of Picasso’s lines.

May you walk in beauty, the Navajo sing. Beauty before you. Beauty behind you.

Outside my window, my azaleas are beginning to bloom. Pink ones and white ones, the white of pure light, the pink showing throats of deep rose. Late flowering, to be sure.

The birds in our yard live according to their own calendar. The return of their full-throated song is a true measure of the season’s progress.

The hawk’s flight, the bird’s song, the mist of tender green clinging to every limb, the bright new calves in neighboring pastures with their unsuspecting mothers—all beauty.

Spring is the great reminder of what’s best in life, beginning with life itself.

Four years ago this week, I knew spring had come to the world outside our windows. But it seemed even more remote than one thickness of dual-paned glass could explain.

Beauty—in song and color—felt almost like a reproach because my dearest one, dying, couldn’t see it or feel it, the glorious time of the year that always raised our spirits.

For a widow, the flow of the year passes like a river broken in places by large round stones. She steps, carefully, from one anniversary stone to another—wedding, first meeting, and eventually death.

I wish Christianity had an equivalent to the Jewish ritual of Yahrzeit to commemorate that last anniversary.

In its absence, however, spring will have to do. Spring will be our time of remembering the man who went in search of it with a friend one cold February decades ago. And found it annually in his “Primavera” columns.

Spring with its optimism, its conviction that the natural life of living things—plant, animal and human—is the most valuable and important commodity. This was his deepest belief.

Leon Hale embodied the virtues of spring in so many ways, retaining youthful capacities for joy and wonder well into the deep winter of his life.

The Navajo sing: In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, lively, may I walk. It is finished in beauty.

Indeed.

Readers can contact Hale at bfhale2017@gmail.com Her new book, This Familiar Heart: An Improbable Love Story, is available at the Fayette County Record office and bookstores, on and offline, everywhere.