SPRING RESOLUTIONS
Tina Hartell
Spring is always horribly abrupt season in Vermont, even when – like this year – May is leisurely and warm.
In many parts of the country, April or even March is the transformative month. I look in wonder at Instagram pictures around the country of flowering trees and gardens in early April when outside my window there’s still 2’ of snow on the ground. It truly feels like I’m looking at pictures of another planet. But then comes May, the last of the snow melts in about 48 hours, and everything that is alive seems to go into hyperdrive to catch up. Up high, the maple, poplar, and ash bloom their strange and familiar flowers. Down low, I watch with excitement as the coltsfoot blooms along the side of the road. Then in yards, the crocuses and hyacinth bloom followed closely by daffodils The flowering trees hit: forsythia, apples, cherries, lilac. Tulips succeed the daffodils. In the woods the ephemerals march through their comforting succession: trout lilies, trillium, wild oats, spring beauties, and jack in the pulpit.
Suddenly it’s all gone as though it never happened.
Spring is over in three weeks.
And I’m standing there saying, ”No wait..I missed it…again.”
My forever spring resolution is to be greedy. I resolve to no more be a lazy flower picker, assuring myself that there will be plenty more later. I resolve to pick in abundance, to gather frantically and fill my house with color and fragrance, and new life. I resolve to lie under a flowering tree. I resolve to wade in the thick, loud ephemeral rivers of snowmelt before they dry up by early summer. I resolve to be outside at night to listen to the wood frogs and peepers sing their mating calls. I resolve to take it all for myself. Because after six months of winter, there are resolutions to be made.
