Spring shadows seem longer
/The Boston Herald
BEVERLY BECKHAM
I find myself lingering over the travel section in newspapers these days, dreaming of all the places I'd like to visit, pausing at photographs of breaking waves and sandy beaches and gardens in bloom, stopping to reread sentences like, "In parks and plazas, Boston wrings pleasure from longer, warmer days."
"Wrings pleasure." It's a nice image, an interesting juxtaposition of words.
Spring makes you notice these things. It makes you long for more than you have and wish for things you didn't even know you wanted. It makes you ache sometimes. But it also makes you aware suddenly of the hundreds of small pleasures right at your fingertips.
Sitting outside at the end of the day, I inhale the sweet scent of azalea while a warm breeze blows and a dogwood rains pink petals on the patio. I hear birds chirping, a dog barking, someone hammering away at the new house behind us, the train whistling, cars whizzing by. Hamburgers are cooking on the grill, my children are home, my husband is on the way.
I know life doesn't get any better than this.
I had the same feeling last Sunday in church watching the children crown the Virgin Mary while singing "Oh Mary, we crown thee with roses today," and the Sunday before, seeing the same children dressed in white, solemnly receive their First Holy Communion.
I have been moved not just to tears but to wonder so many times in the past few weeks: at the flowers I didn't tend to, didn't cover or prune or even feed last fall, inching back from the dead, rising from trampled ground where my dog Molly rolls and runs, emerging somehow whole and healthy, despite no help from me; at the earnest words of my godchild, Connor, who told me when I phoned the night before his First Communion, "Tomorrow is the most important day of my life"; at my friend's daughter's Bat Mitzvah, when the rabbi said to those in attendance everything the priest says every week, about the importance of doing the right thing, not the easy thing, about our obligation to love one another, and be there for one another and be an asset to the world.
This is how we should live our lives: with our eyes wide open; with appreciation and joy; with regard and respect and consideration for one another.
Everyone seems to agree. Everyone says this. Yet still we don't live this way.
Somehow, in the spring, this unalterable fact seems sadder.
Everything seems sadder, and happier, too. It's as if possibility and probability are pulling our hearts in opposite directions, stretching them, making them thinner, so that we feel in a way we can't feel in February, when our hearts are thick-skinned and frozen and numb.
In spring our hearts are tender.
Perhaps that's why the news of the world, the bad news coming from all corners of the earth as well as our own backyards, seems to hurt more these days. The unending reports of deceit, aggression, betrayal, murder and death feel unbearable because they contrast with all the good that we see in front of us: Little boys in Little League uniforms strutting down the street, wearing their hats and carrying their gloves; pregnant women, like spring itself, brimming with new life and endless possibility. Mothers pushing babies in carriages. Teenagers driving with their car windows down and their radios turned up. Graduates from grade school to college smiling and posing for a camera. Young girls strolling home from school, less hurried these days, their hair swinging behind them, the whole summer, their whole lives, ahead of them.
Bees are so busy they bump into one another; thrushes so cheerful they keep belting out songs; young children so full of life they can't walk, they have to run everywhere.
People are smiling, talking, taking walks, eating lunch outdoors, enjoying life, appreciating spring. For seconds, sometimes moments, people are happy.
And yet on the radio, on TV and in the papers, there is unremitting hopelessness.
The news casts a shadow on our happiness. It's a shadow that's always there. But it feels more incongruous in the spring.
