Dear Spring,
I am writing to you from the last days of winter, when the ground is still cold but something beneath it has already begun to move. I cannot see what it is yet — only the faintest softening of the earth, a subtle shift in the quality of light, and the way the birds have started singing again as if they know something I do not.
On Waiting
I have been thinking about the way you arrive — not all at once, like turning on a light, but gradually, like a dawn that has been building since midnight. The first signs are so subtle that only those who have been watching can read them: the slight swelling of buds on bare branches, the way moss turns from gray-green to emerald, the first crocus pushing through snow.
This is what I love most about you, Spring — you understand that the most powerful transformations are the slowest ones. You do not rush. You arrive by degrees, each day adding a new note to the symphony, until one morning I step outside and realize that the world has become unrecognizably alive.
On Return
Every year, I forget how green the world can be. Winter has a way of making me believe that the landscape has always been brown, that the trees have always been bare, that the air has always carried this particular chill. And then you return, and I am astonished all over again — not just by the colors and the warmth, but by the sheer improbability of it all.
How does a bare branch know to produce leaves? How does a dormant bulb remember the shape of a flower? How does a world that appeared so thoroughly dead become so thoroughly alive? These are the questions you leave in your wake, Spring, and they are questions that have nothing to do with science and everything to do with wonder.
On Impermanence
I know that you, too, will pass. Already I can feel summer breathing behind you, waiting its turn. The cherry blossoms you bring will scatter within days. The spring bulbs will fade, and their foliage will yellow. The fresh green of new leaves will deepen to the darker, more permanent green of summer.
But I have learned not to mourn your passing. Each spring is a letter that the world writes to itself — a reminder that endings are always temporary, that dormancy is not death, and that the most beautiful things in life are the ones we cannot hold but can always trust to return.
With gratitude and wonder,
A watcher of flowers
"Spring does not arrive — it returns. And in that return, it teaches us that every ending carries within it the seed of a new beginning."
