They are everywhere suddenly, signs and signifiers of spring, in what the calendar insists is still the last week of winter.
They are not the same, not always: a sign is evidence; a signifier, symbol. Occasionally, we are granted both in one.
So it was yesterday, a day that began warmer than it ended, dawning cloudy and with a tinge of humidity in the air, turned to dusk beneath brutally clear skies battered by the winds. It was sometime after midday that I noticed it.
The aspens birthed the first catkins of the season yesterday.
They are signs of spring, yes, evidence in its purest form that the warming season is here. They are, after all, a stage of arboreal metamorphosis, the puffy protective cocoon in which the buds transform themselves into nascent leaves.
More meaningful to me personally, though, is their status as signifier: as symbol of spring’s promise; as marker of the lands and lives of memory. So much of memory, at least my own, is lived in the senses — remembered sights and sounds and scents, the feel of texture, of warmth and cold. The buzzing humidity of a summer’s day, the sound of an autumn wind rustling through dried cornstalks, the sharp tang of snow descending from the sky . . . and the plush velvet softness of the catkins in spring — these, and more, carry me across the threshold between each season and through the year, allowing me the luxury of living in our world here even as a fragment of my spirit remains alive in the one that was once my home.
Of all the seasons, spring is typically the one that appeals to me the least. Where others mourn the winter blues, my own blues intensify beneath the cornflower skies of spring. Part of it is the indecisiveness of it, unwilling to let go of winter, yet just as unwilling to welcome summer warmth; part of it is the physical hardship of navigating a world whose chief characteristics, in this place at least, are gale-force winds and two inches of mud. I was born of autumn, and it is the fall and winter months that are home to my spirit, but at least in summer the mercury knows its own mind. For the next two months, we will be flung alternately between bitter cold and unseasonal heat, and the wind will drive the drum of the earth’s heartbeat.
Still, for now, at least, I have the gift of life and memory, of signs and signifiers of springtime and simpler times. For now, we will spend our days at work beneath cornflower blue skies, surrounded by the rich, lush velvet of the catkins . . . and my spirit’s home, this one and one from long ago, are here with me at the slightest touch.
~ Aji
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