In Between
I love how the morning fog makes the air look soft.
From my customary perch on a massive fallen black walnut tree just ten yards in from the walking path, I sit silent as a rock while the mist mutes the rough edges of a shagbark hickory and pulls me into all sorts of imaginings and stories, as only the a fog-draped forest can do. A crow overhead laughs his way across the canopy, joined by his sisters in cackling merriment. It’s encouraging to hear the songs of those early returning bird relatives and my heart feels softened too with the promise of another spring just behind the curtains.
Winter still has us clutched in its chilly fist—who knows what that cagey ol’ March will bring?—but we know we’ve turned that corner just an inch. If you haven’t started tomato and cabbage seedlings, better get a move on. And those fingerlings, they can be pushed into the cold soil in a few weeks; please don’t let the mud put you off. They love that (you can always hose off your boots later, like…in October when you’re done with the harvest). The garlic bulbs my sister and I pressed into small holes of dirt last fall are still sleeping but, I suspect, with one eye open in anticipation of that “go!” trigger that will send their best shoots upward and on their way to being garlic scape pesto for our early summer pasta dishes. Sometimes I walk ‘round their raised bed just to cheer them on. Over my shoulder, the patient volunteer mulberry tree that claimed her spot smack in the middle of the garden holds herself in readiness, dreaming, I’m sure, of the loads of fruit that will bend her branches toward the thin grass in the first weeks of June. I’ll be ready with that berry juice-stained white sheet I spread at her feet to collect them all.
Living in the space of not-yet, the in between of two stark and generous seasons, it’s hard not to anticipate what’s next, what could happen, what might make itself known, and suddenly, winter will melt the last of her icy-fingered grip on our souls, giving spring all kinds of room to charm and delight us once again. I’ve welcomed this transition 60+ times in my short life and she always catches me by surprise with her birdsong and flowing creeks and slippery mud. Moles push mounds of crumbly rich earth through last year’s matted old thatch, dotting the slope down to the old goat barn like chocolate sprinkles on an elaborately decorated farm-themed cake. The mower is in the shop for its annual tune-up and my dreams are filled with the scent of freshly cut grass.
I suppose we’re always in between something, aren’t we? This season or that one, last year’s birthday and this year’s Christmas, sunrise and dusk, beginnings and endings (whether we know they’re coming or not). And it’s in that middle place where life happens—to us, through us, and with us. The weather just makes it a little more real and stirs the longing in our hearts toward a future that isn’t promised to anyone. Sitting in the old red chair from the lake house, the one I happily inherited when Mom and Dad could no longer spend their summers there, I am here, now, pulling words into sentences and grateful that two of the four kitties are romping outside beneath the stars. I’m in between hours spent in the studio and a clean, comfortable bed waiting to cradle me off to sleep. I need nothing more than what I have in this moment, and the next, and the next. My lungs work beautifully, I fed myself a wonderful dinner, my teeth are brushed and there’s a stillness surrounding me that only the house can give.
If now is all we have, I can live with that. So can the robin perched in the uppermost branches of the silver maple sapling behind the house, singing as if she never left. And the creek, filled with last month’s melted snowfall, gurgles its way over the rocks and fallen branches-turned-bridges, knowing only her need to keep moving. Funny, isn’t it, how the space in between moments is so darn full? As if it isn’t “space” at all.
In so many ways, spring is already here.
