Spring is trying, really it is. Green shoots shove through the half-frozen earth. Maples redden with buds.
But the snow keeps falling, and the colds winds keep blowing and the temperatures keep dropping.
In Virginia and throughout much of the country, in the landscape of the body and the landscape of the soul, it’s the winter that won’t go away.
They came in the evening and they came in the morning. Good friends, coffee buddies, nieces, nephews, cousins, neighbors.
They came bearing photos and family trees, casseroles and sandwiches. You have to eat, and you have to talk, and the physical comfort of friends and food eases the grieving. Doesn’t banish it, of course, but softens it.
The last few days have been a whirlwind of calls, visits and rituals. Of looking through photo albums and sorting through papers.
It’s better not to stop too long.
The days that follow death are filled with rituals and details and their own to-do lists. Soon these busy hours will give way to ones of raw loss. I know that. But until then, I’m still coasting on tales of my dad shared at the wake. On the love and support of family and friends. On the Brahms German Requiem in my ears as I walk. And on transcendence.
Two stories from my girls at the time of their grandfather’s passing. One sat down two hours later — unaware of what had happened, five time zones away in Africa — and wrote him a letter.
Another snapped this photograph of our street as she was leaving to fly here and be with me. It was taken in the exact hour of Dad’s passing and is as radiant and other-worldly as I’ve ever seen the place.
Coincidences? Probably. But today I’m believing otherwise.
(Photo: Claire Capehart)
My father died on the first day of spring, just as the sun was rising — the sun that would be up all day in a cloudless blue sky.
Blue skies were Dad’s specialty. Not that he didn’t have plenty of storm clouds. But he endured them or ignored them or sometimes just opened his umbrella and danced through the rain.
One of my first and fondest memories of Dad is walking outside with him one morning on a family vacation to Colorado. Dad loved the Rocky Mountains, had spent time in Denver when he was in the service, after he’d flown 35 combat missions over Europe as a tail gunner in a B17 bomber. So as soon as he and Mom had a few dollars in their pocket, they drove my brother and me out west. I was five years old at the time, but I distinctly remember Dad looking up at the whitened peaks and the blue beyond and saying, “Look, there’s not a cloud in the sky.”
So I looked and saw and remembered — and I learned from his example. I learned that there is almost nothing so dire that it can’t be remedied by a good laugh. I learned that you can never tell someone you love them too many times. And finally, to quote a favorite movie of mine, I learned from his life that “no man is a failure who has friends.”
Dad was the youngest of six and the last to go. He leaves behind a wife, four children, seven grandchildren, many nieces, nephews and cousins — and lots and lots of friends. He never knew a stranger.
I write this at an hour when Dad and I, both early risers, would often be up alone together. This is my first morning to wake without him in the world. I have no complaints. He was on this earth for almost 91 years. But I wish he could be here 91 more.
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.
On Saturday I spotted signs of spring, snowdrops and green shoots, that pinkish haze that appears in the tree tops, proof the old oaks are coming to life.
It struck me as I strolled that I might be imagining the greening branches, the swollen buds, that maybe they were like the puddles of water that appear on a hot summer tarmac.
Because today, St. Patty’s Day, I’m not so sure. It looks like a foot of snow outside. It’s the whiting of the green. And for some reason, I welcome it.
It’s such a quiet, dutiful dousing, wet and heavy, clinging to each twig and bough. It stills me — and fills me with wonder, that such meteorlogical marvels can exist this far into the greening season.
Spring will come soon, no way it cannot. The shoots and buds are biding their time. But for now, on this day devoted to green, we have a different kind of beauty. It’s white.
Has there ever been such an aeronautical mystery? Of course there has, I tell myself. There was Amelia Earhart. But she had no transponders, no black box. When I mention Amelia Earhart to my kids, they draw a blank. That mystery is forgotten.
But the mystery of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 is not. How could it be? Cable news blares it almost nonstop, and there are newspaper articles on the quality of the coverage and the amount of speculation the story forces on reporters.
Today’s leads are some of the most dramatic. The plane flew for hours after the transponder was turned off. It appears that the aircraft was deliberately diverted, says the Malaysian prime minister. I drag out an old atlas, refresh my geography of the Malay peninsula and Indian Ocean. I catch up on a week’s worth of facts and rumors. I consider how much this seems like a made-for-TV movie.
And then, like most people in the plugged-in, news-aware world, I wonder: How does a huge jetliner disappear? Could it possibly have landed? Where did it go? Where is it now? And will we ever, ever find it?
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!
My suburb is quiet, given its proximity to a major international airport. But when a wild wind barrels in from the west, planes are routed over the house and the sound of jet engines fills the sky. The harder the wind blows, the more planes there seem to be. Just the opposite of what one would like, of course.
Last night the airliners seemed to be using Folkstone Drive as a runway and skimming the tops of the tall oaks. The fact that I was dodging limbs and crunching over downed tree branches on the drive home only heightened this impression. I was glad to pull into the garage.
But this morning the wind still roars and the planes still circle. Winter is back, and it wants us to know it.
A free hour, from 6-7 last evening, and the trail beckoned. The sun was low in the sky and the evening was soft and warm. Cyclists whizzed by me and my legs felt heavy and tired, so I kept to the right and warmed up slowly.
Ten minutes in and I was flying. Well, not really. But it felt that way. It’s been such a long, cold winter. And to be dressed only in one layer, moving at my own pace down a path in the suburbs, seemed perfection to me then.
Maybe it was runner’s high or maybe it was spring fever — and it certainly had something to do with daylight savings time. But whatever it was, I was not alone.
Everyone I saw — from the ferociously helmeted bikers to the boxy guy padding along in thin sandals — seemed to feel the same way.