Spring and Flowers and Inspiration

I've always loved spring. It's not just the normal coming-out-of-winter kind of feeling - I was born in the spring and I always felt that the season was specially made for me.

Where we live they celebrate the blossoming of all the fruit trees with a festival called, logically enough, Blossomtime. They hold a parade on the first Saturday in May and since my birthday is on May 4th, inevitably the parade would occasionally fall on my birthday.

Once when I was very young, probably only 4 or 5, my family went to the parade, meeting up with families from my Dad's workplace in a gas station closed for the event as we did every year. It was my birthday that year and I remember I was wearing a brand new peddle pusher outfit. They gave me a surprise birthday cake while we waited for the parade to reach the area we were at and my Dad told me that the parade was really for me to celebrate my birthday.

I believed him. And, though it didn't take too many more years for me to realize I wasn't the center of that particular universe, I've always felt a kind of excitement about spring ever since (and secretly believed that parade WAS for me).

The past two years have been a little rough. My mother died two years ago on May 1, right in the middle of what would have traditionally been a happy time. She was a spring baby too - it's something we shared in common. It was an early spring that year, as it is this year and I brought her simple flowers in the last few weeks of her life - daffodils, tulips, lilacs and iris - trying to bring a little touch of her much loved garden into her sick room.

This spring is much better. It took a while, but I am finally feeling happy again. This spring is extremely early for our area of the country and all the fruit trees are already blooming - five weeks too soon. When that Blossomtime parade comes (not quite on my birthday this year) there will be no blossoms to celebrate.

But I don't care. I'll take that jump start on spring and marvel at the beauty all around me. It's inspiring, it makes these old bones start to feel the stirrings of youth again. And isn't that what spring is all about?