The sun is out. I distinctly hear the singing of birds. Spring is beginning to drop hints, as the sun inches higher into the sky.
I check the weather forecast, and it will barely get above freezing for the next 10 days. This light, increasingly bright, is such a tease. I check the calendar, which offers more hopeful news than the weather forecast had — daylight savings ends in just a couple of weeks. Here in Cleveland, it will once again be light until 7 p.m.!
All this makes me wonder, why do we live here? Why do so many of us choose to live in a climate where the seasons make themselves known so intensely? We could opt to live where the clues are more subtle, but it’s as though we have sought out the extremes.
Perhaps we appreciate the summer that much more, for having endured the cold. Perhaps we are masochists. Or, perhaps, we simply do it because it’s what our parents did before us, and their parents before them.
How many of our decisions are passed on in this way, unconsciously through our ancestry? How often do we stop to think of where the voices in our head are really calling from? What if we are living out a struggle passed on from someone else, and what would happen if we decided to look at it squarely? This thing we glimpsed in the cold dark of winter, can we gouge it and plant anew?
But then, the birds start singing. We know spring is coming, and it won’t be winter again for many months. What seemed so massive in the darkness is no longer apparent — has it gone? Or, does it lurk in the shadows?
The sun is getting brighter. My eyes drink in this refreshing light, and I begin to look for signs of new life.
