The spring and I

Relationship status: it’s complicated.

It’s that season again. Our social feeds explode with florals, poetic captions spilling over into the comments. And I get it—that impulse to put all our faith into spring’s promise. The collective breath of fresh air is intoxicating. After a long winter, we worship the arrival of breezes laced with wet dirt and honey. The jubilant dance of daffodils. The sun winking at us through the windows as if to say, “Come play.”

But Bovina is a late bloomer.

Particularly here, on the north-facing slant overlooking Mountain Brook, at 2,200 feet, where our home sits on a rocky crumble of earth. Here, the snow is always last to disappear. As the rest of the Catskills awakens around us—overflowing the creek beds, unfurling in the valleys, and poking out through sidewalk cracks—here, we wait. I peer from behind the curtains, listening to the gutters drip, my anxiety quickening.

The truth is, I’m not ready. I haven’t had my shower. I don’t want to bare my legs. I’m reluctant to schedule a catch up or have a friendly run-in. What would I even say? I don’t know where the weeks went. We got sick. I lost track. I’m six months pregnant. So many excuses.

Maybe I should cut myself a little slack. It’s been a month since Joel brought home a nasty virus, and I still have a dry cough and a sore throat that makes me wince. (He’s fine, by the way.) The other day, I tried to sing through it. I wanted to feel happy! This was unwise. I got so painfully hoarse I was forced to pop some NyQuil and crawl, defeated, into bed by 9pm. At least that night I didn’t wake myself up hacking.

Needless to say, my second trimester hasn’t been characteristically energetic. I’ve been crashing a lot instead. Gregg’s been traveling for work, too, so when daycare was slated to close for spring break, I decided to take Joel to North Carolina to see his grandparents. That way, perhaps I could do some actual writing. (Naturally, I had a few freelance jobs that trickled in right around the same time my kid and I got sick.) My first day in Raleigh, my mom found me passed out on my bedroom floor amid a tangle of charging cables, an untouched cup of coffee, and a half-eaten apple. Bless her, she let me rest.

Now, back home in Bovina, all around me it feels like everyone is emerging dewy-eyed and fresh. And I’m envious! I want to want to come out of my chrysalis, and to have some fancy new wings to show for it. But alas. While my neighbors twist dandelion crowns for their kids and clip ramps from secret backyard patches, I hang back, hunched over my computer, trying to finish another draft. I skip the thing, and the other thing, because I’m behind on writing but also because I’m just not feeling it yet. I swallow hard against the tightness in my neck. A coughing fit triggers Braxton Hicks.

From my place at the window, I watch a porcupine pass through a bramble thicket, all thorny and unbothered. The next time I walk Kola, I decide we will look for it.

She’s a good girl, and understands her task immediately. After giving the area a thorough sniff, she takes off down the hillside, dragging me and the baby bump behind her. But as we reach a small clearing, the hunt is quickly forgotten and replaced by ecstatic zoomies. She circles me, kicking up clumps of dead leaves, snatching at sticks and tossing them with her teeth. Laughing, I wait until she plops down, panting and happy. That’s when I notice. Around us, thousands of mottled trout lily leaves have sprouted from the detritus. And there, yawning out from under a mossy log, a tender yellow blossom. I crouch down close, reach out, and a droplet rolls off its petal onto my fingertip. “Hi,” I whisper. “You’re right on time.”