For these few weeks in the year, the morning sun comes to the window so strong that it hits the prism hanging there and refracts color onto the white walls. Every few minutes I have to shift my screen, or the light will erase my face from the video on the Zoom call.
After so many wintry months, my ears had grown accustomed to the rain’s sounds: a static whisper added to a conversation to denote that sprinkles had started once again, despite your reliance on the weather reports. The crackle of thunder as it crossed scales (they remind me of the diagram of electrons shifting energy levels, but expanded to massive proportions over the night sky). And in the middle of the night, the clatter of the broken gate out back as it swung on its hinges, its poor metal a ward of the wind.
All of these sounds had become welcome in my life, and now this sky brings a different sound. Air drifting through wide space. Springtime.
My mother grew up here in Los Angeles, and Spring is her favorite season. I was never quite sure why, although she listed the usual reasons. Spring would have made more sense for my dad since he spends so much time gardening, but I recall him choosing Summer, like me.
I am from the Bay Area, now Silicon Valley. As a kid, I had more access to trees, lawns, walking paths. Spring was the tease before the gates could be thrown open, allowing me to roam. The constant warmth of Summer gave me the choice to stay outside longer. But ever since I moved here, I appreciate Spring in a different way that gives me a new kinship with my mother, although hundreds of miles away, wordlessly.
Spring brings an attention to detail that Los Angeles’s chronic summer lacks. It is a brief breathing period of temperance, something that my mom has always had a skill for. She cherishes moments of rest in the balance of life and delights in little treats like teatime with scones. These thoughts would have taken her far away from the blanched San Fernando Valley to the pleasant British gardens of her Austenian films. I understand now how Spring might have spoken to her wishes.
I move into the bathroom to brush my teeth, something that I had run out of time for before my Zoom. Out of the bathroom window, I hear a mourning dove. Its rhythmic coo returns me home, too: throughout my childhood, mourning doves chose our front porch to build their nests, returning year after year to birth the next generation. To hear it here, in the middle of the coastal breeze’s fresh movement, brings up a smattering of old identities:
I am on top of the play structure and looking up at Spring’s cherry blossoms in the afternoon, and their petals bathe me with scent. I am hunched over my grandparents’ kitchen counter where the tile and grout lines smell like years of soap and coffee grinds. I am leaving home with my backpack on, and as soon as I open the front door, the morning sun is brash on my eyes. My shoes pause on the brick of the front step, and I make eye contact with the mourning dove who protects her young from me.
How many of my assumptions hold true? If I were to ask my family members now what their favorite seasons are, I wonder how many would choose Spring.
I wonder how much longer these seasons will act in accordance with the names we have given them, and what names we will create for whatever comes after.
But my next call begins in three minutes, and I have a job to do.
Spring! Still my favorite: hope, the flowers and the lengthening of daylight hours. And we have a new dove on the nest!