my annual Remembering is on its way. the part of each year when the warm weather stuns me anew. the light in the cabin changes. the sun feels like less of a fair-weather friend than she has these last few months, and the woods smell of hemlock bark, wet from the rain and the melting snow.
my son notices, too. the moment we step out into it all he says he would like to walk. he holds tightly to my pointer finger and tromps through the soft slush, over the half-living grasses, across the patches of ice and the big flat rocks in the garden. he stumbles with a “whoa!” and carries on proudly. his baby days are over, at least to him. in due time there will be blueberries, and new rocks in the garden that he found himself. he will not be confined to his great big basket or his red wagon like last year, but in the garden pulling the husks off of ground cherries.
sometimes for us, even spring doesn’t end the winter right off, but I have a feeling when it does the Remembering is going to hit my heart over the head even harder than usual. in a great, head-over-heels sort of way.
