Spring

I woke up this morning to the sun. Still wearing winter's mood, I stood outside listening to the sounds of spring - birds chirping, squirrels chattering, a slight breeze rustling the fallen memories of fall, and the distant hum of a lawn mower.

Slowly, the smell of spring undressed winter from my soul and glimmers of rebirth began to sprout where silence and hibernation lived only moments before.  My thoughts of course thawed to those of something new, something with seedlings of me planted deeply there and tending to those seedlings with love, caring and passion. 

I glanced to the still naked tree in my back yard with its nakedness revealing the wooden box placed in the crook of two branches that has served as a nesting place for several generations of young squirrels.  It's empty this year.  No family of bushy tailed creatures darting in and out of the round hole that was cut by someone who once lived in the bigger box next to the tree.

For a moment, I was sullen with the thought that this place has become so barren.  That the sounds of children's voices from previous tenants have evaporated from the walls, that the gardens have only evidence of the most stubborn ancestors of plants from owners ago.  But, as seasons go, one dying for the other to live, so did my sadness.

"This isn't an ending, "I thought. "it's the beginning." 

These surroundings have become barren as if to provide a clean slate for those who will come next and to ease me gently, naturally, out of one season of my life to the next.  These surroundings and the way I feel in them are detoxifying.  I am cleansing myself of past mistreatments, hanging on to those things that are hearty enough to survive and readying myself for rebirth and renewal. 

It is spring, and there will be much cleaning. There will be the clearing of the dead for the new to arrive. I will tend to this house with respect, but no longer with the thought that it is my mine because my home and my spring are there.   They are in the specks of sawdust that lay in the corner of a garage miles away. They are in the journey that will take me to there, to my new home, to my own nest that will no longer be empty.