A Walker in the Suburbs

When I woke yesterday I thought it would be another exercise-in-the-house day, but by mid-afternoon, I could see black pavement on my street and beyond.

Whether it was due to the relatively warm pavement temperature of mid-March or my county’s new, hard-won facility with snow removal, the roads were clear and I could walk through winter unimpeded.

This was a gift. I didn’t have to look down at my feet, dodging snow, slush or ice. I could look at trees sagging with the white stuff, at snow heaped on buds near to blossoming.

For a moment I was in an alternative universe, one stripped of color, where spring comes not in yellow, pink and purple, but in parchment, eggshell and alabaster.

It was a window on winter, before it goes away.

A delay in writing this morning gives me more time to think (a dangerous activity!). And what I’m thinking about is March, this in-between month. One day spring, the next day winter. Unsettling, to say the least. But also inevitable.

Weather, like so many other things, is never a smooth progression from one season to another. It’s a series of fits and starts, of warm southerly breezes challenged by Arctic fronts. Of rain that changes to snow and back to rain again. Of jackets in the morning and sweaters in the afternoon.

But don’t we need such “give,” such wiggle room, in our own lives? I’m thinking about how we acquire skills, how babies learn to walk or talk and how adults learn — well, almost anything, how to tap dance, for instance! Hard-won mastery one day, two left feet the next.

I’m trying to learn a lesson from March, to see in its intermittency a gracious acceptance of change and growth. Heaven knows I need it!