Tag Archives: Spring

To Everything a Season

Book stack
 
The way I walk I see my mother walking, the feet secure and firm upon the ground.
The way I talk I hear my daughter talking, and hear my mother’s echo in the sound.
The way she thought I find myself now thinking, the generations linking in a firm continuum of mind.
The bridge of immortality I’m walking, the voice before me echoing behind.
by Dorothy Hilliard Moffatt

The hostas are coming up; tiny shoots penetrating the soil and unfurling, the coils of their leaves break the earth in a luscious green array.  The newness of each eruption symbolizes advent, a beginning.   Winter’s end yields to a yawning genesis of pure potentiality; at its origin, the verdant metamorphosis of a living thing is simply breath-taking.  And sensual.  It is the caress of a gossamer breeze across the face; the warmth of sunshine on skin; the lyric birdsong of nest-makers in flight.   It is, too, the delicate scent of a newborn’s hair inhaled, the soft curve of a cheek traced, the exquisite beauty of a child’s form realized.  Senses awaken.  Life, lying dormant, regenerates.  From nothing, something.   This is how it starts—the dawning of spring.  The cycle of a human life.

My Grammy died a few months before Sydney, with a full head of copper hair, was born.  My fiery Irish matriarch of a grandmother called me ‘love,’ drank Olympia beer from the little cans and quoted A.A. Milne.  She was the first person I loved to die (“Don’t say ‘pass away’ when I’m gone, FOR GOD’S SAKE.  I’ll be DEAD!  Say, ‘She died.’”).  I was bereft she wasn’t there to hold her great-granddaughter, but the significance of one life ending and another beginning wasn’t lost on me.  Ancestral generations come full circle and begin again.  I must fade so my children can blossom.

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Filed under Adolescence, Aging, Babies, Grandparents, Growing Up, Loss, Memories, Motherhood, Parenting, Self-Care