Let’s name this day spring

There is always a day each year – not always the same one – I officially name as spring.

My favourite season, spring, is upon us, and I get why it is often compared to youth with all its newness and budding young buds.

I’ve always seen spring as quite forceful, though, protective and fiercely determined in the job it has to do.

I saw spring’s strength one wintery day when a small fragile snowdrop pushed itself up through severe ice and snow in my garden. It swayed, doubled over often, but never broke as its fragile green stalk found north again in that rock hard earth.

Spring is the caretaker that arrives to prepare for the other seasons. A determined mother, perhaps, readying the stage for her children to bloom later and is again why I think of spring as age and wisdom.

There is always a day each year – not always the same one – I officially name as spring. It used to be when Bronnie brought me the first daffodils of the season. In subsequent years, it might be the smell of hyacinths on the wind or a whiff of Creed’s Fleurissimo perfume.

Sometimes there is no trigger or, if there is, it is subliminal. I wake and just feel the lighter and brighter days we are headed for. If it is a work day, black and grey clothes are cast aside or offset with a daring dash of red or yellow. A lunch of comforting soup makes way for fresh salad leaves and lightly grilled anything in the evening.

Spring was also the time my beloved garden came to life. I would spend hours (sun up to way past sun down) fingers deep in God’s earth. I have spoken before about the sense of grace I felt when gardening. (You Don’t Bring Me Flowers.)

Mercifully, the stirrings I feel in spring did not go away with Bronnie and my garden. Even in the city, I can recognise a day that smells sunflower fresh, a day full of possibilities, a day I name spring.