The air is definitely smelling like spring, and spring has always and forever been my favorite time of the year. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a special relationship with this season. It may be because I was a spring baby, or maybe it was because my grandfather was a professional gardener.
Every spring he carefully and meticulously transferred his tiny flowers that had often times been grown from seeds over the winter from greenhouse to soil. He tenderly covered his employer’s world with the beauty, the smells and the love that only these magnificent works of nature could manifest.
He created amazing sculpted formal gardens like the ones that in London and Paris. They were formal, carefully groomed, and patterned, featuring dozens of floral combinations, manicured hedges, and plants. His work was natural art that, in hindsight, could never be fully embraced by the mind of a kid.
Maybe I love spring because, like the maple trees that lined Maple Street where I played as a young boy, I’m just a little sappy. I was actually a substitute Maple King back in the 1980’s in Meyersdale, PA, when the chosen king, Congressman Jack Murtha, had to cancel at the last minute. Nothing says spring like the Meyersdale Maple Festival.
Another spring fill-in day was when I was called on at 11:30 a.m. to speak at noon to the Somerset Rotary Club in place of Chuck Noll’s assistant coach, George Perles, who had canceled at the last minute. My speech to 120 men who came to hear the Pittsburgh Steelers assistant football coach was “The Value of the Arts in Our Lives.” Yeah, really?
In spring, there is new life, new hope, new love, and new dreams. All of these things have been consistent for me during this season of hope and rebirth. I’m definitely not alone in my feelings about spring. All one needs to do is sit and watch the extremely amorous birds chasing each other around the trees and bushes. Nature really gets it, too.
Spring is most probably the reason that I have chosen not to move to places like Arizona or Florida. Vive la difference. To me those almost single-season places are a little like cream of wheat on a white plate. Don’t get me wrong, they have plenty of good attributes when we’re freezing to death, and at least Florida has plenty of drama, but the absolute beauty of slipping from the heavy winter coat to the polo shirt and tennies is completely unmatched.
Feeling the warm sun embrace you like an old friend and smelling the sweet air of fresh blossoms is like a child opening a long anticipated present on Christmas morning. Seeing the grass come back to life (and knowing that you will not be the one to have to cut it) is completely special, too.
This is my first spring without my brother. It’s been a long nine months since he left us, and there hasn’t been a day that’s gone by that he hasn’t been in my heart and mind. You see, he too loved spring, but unlike me, he loved working in the soil and loved working with his wife to help make plants and flowers and trees and special bushes grow.
He went to our childhood home before it was sold and then to our grandparent’s home, and he captured, nurtured, and raised the very same plants that surrounded us in our youth. He found the flowers and shrubs, and filled his yard with those thriving, living memories. The smells and colors of our childhood are captured in the middle of a backyard in the city.
He was spring on so many levels, and this year, this spring, whenever spring really comes, it will be his spring.
We never really die, we just transition. This year is his year.
