Some people think of January, when the calendar year begins, as a time of fresh starts. For teachers and students, it’s the fall — when school starts — that provides a clean slate. For me, spring, when nature is a showoff, is synonymous with new beginnings. The association comes from my childhood when my mom took us on walks to search for “signs of spring.”
The practice began in spring of 1975 when we moved to Ft. Knox, Kentucky.
“I have memories of that spring to this day,” my mom says. She recalls getting up early in the mornings to sit on our screened porch alone for a while before my siblings and I woke up. “Spring started earlier in Kentucky than I was used to,” says my mom, who grew up in Washington State. “It took my breath away. It just unfolded. I thought, ‘There can’t be more birds. There can’t be more blossoms. There just can’t.’ It was just gorgeous. I had never seen anything like that before.”
My mom turned her awe of Kentucky seasons into an activity and the “signs of spring” walks were born. “We needed things to do,” she explains. So she gathered the neighborhood kids at our house and gave us brown paper lunch bags to decorate. Then we headed out, each with our own bag. “There was a winding path through the neighborhood and we walked along that. You gathered things that symbolized spring,” she explains. “Buds and blooms and sprouts and feathers. Caterpillars and worms.” We also listened for birds and talked about how we could hear spring.
“We came back and laid everything out and had some kind of little party and show and tell,” says Mom. “We ate something unhealthy like brownies and Kool-Aid. It was a big deal.”
Indeed it was. And here I am writing about it 47 years later. But maybe that’s because it wasn’t just a one-time thing. We eventually added “signs of autumn” walks to our repertoire. And then, when my siblings and I became parents, my mom taught her grandkids to pay attention to the seasons.
I’ve been trying to pay attention for decades now. The four seasons are predictable, but they still have the ability to shock me. In that way, they’re a lot like middle age. I’m in my 50s. At this point in life, there is so much regularity. So much monotony. So many of the unknowns are now known. Or so I think. The harbingers of change are all around me, but still I often miss them, misinterpret them — or am completely caught off guard.
I forget that just because my teenager is rude to me, doesn’t mean it’s about me. I fail to always see when my marriage needs attention. I make the same mistakes over and over (too many beers, too few hours of sleep). And yet, when I pay attention, when I really pay attention like the poet Mary Oliver urged us to do, I can still be surprised.
So much of the discourse around middle age is negative. We view it as the end of so many things. We talk about empty nests and estrogen. Downsizing and defying gravity. But when I slow down, look, and listen, like my mother taught me, I see that there are also so many new beginnings. There are still surprises. I’ve started a new job. I have more free time. More flexibility. More time to read and exercise. (Maybe this is why that magazine for middle-aged women was called More?)
Back in Kentucky on that screened-in porch, my mom was sure there couldn’t be more. And nature surprised her. I’m so grateful she taught me to pay attention, too.
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Also on my mind
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