I strolled through the woods, buoyed by the balmy wind, and cocooned by the scent of petrichor. The scene before me was a rippling mirage of earthen and umber hues fused with the steely gray strokes of winter. The showers from earlier in the day had dissipated, and the wisps of ashen clouds melted away as the watery sunlight seeped through the powder blue sky that hung overhead. An arch of denuded boughs coiled to the sky, each russet surface jeweled with pearls of dew, the droplets making the whole landscape gleam. As I walked I examined these sinewy branches as they knit a maze around me, mimicking the muddy terrain underfoot, strewn with broken shafts and pine straws. As I stumbled into the same clearing I sat in a mere week ago, a breeze infused with teasing memories of ice cream and chlorine danced with the tendrils of an unforgiving arctic gust and swept past me. I found a relatively dry outcropping of rock and perched on it, inhaling the sunlight that the New English winter deprived me of. Where there was once a jagged mound of ice, the was now a patch of crusty white; I idly watched as the dry crystals morphed into a curtain of rivulets that carved through the mucky landscape, pooling in the depressions around fallen branches. A fine layer of mist coated the atmosphere and alighted on my face, a refreshing contrast to the chafing warmth produced by radiators I’d slipped away from.
The spring seemed to crawl in like a tide, blanketing my corner of the world with warmth and white sunshine one day and abruptly retreating the next. It struck me with an element of hilarity then, how often the seasons reflect my mindset of the moment. The winter was a tapestry of morose wallowing, but a springtime sprinkled with daffodils and dragonflies simply didn’t seem to want to advance. Instead, I beheld the dull splay before me, drained of much-anticipated color and activity. Everything I’d been working for and wanting dangled at the very edges of the horizon, tantalizingly close but entirely beyond my control and reach. The clouds were due to clear, but every afternoon of sunshine was chased up by a night of gray storms, depleting nature’s palette by morning, and with it, my spirit and motivation. Much like the temperature outside that inched up only to drop by dusk, it felt as though the tangled state of affairs in my own life improved by degrees only for everything to plummet should I steal a moment’s rest.
At the very moment those thoughts crossed my mind, I felt the first bead of water break on my brow; the coincidence caused an incredulous peal of laughter to escape my lips and ring across the clearing, interrupting the harmonized chorus of bird call. Of course it was going to drizzle again. I lept off the boulder, past the arc of branches, and held my arms out to the bare sky, my upturned cheeks kissed by sunlight. The warble of birds echoed between the tree trunks, the notes flitting between the raindrops, weaving a spell over me. I hovered there, swaying to the melody of twilight, attempting to absorb the essence of hope from the birdsong. The sparrows sang of spring days to come. They sang of clear blue skies and sunshine, of coconut and lavender, of evenings playing on swings with skirts fluttering around my calfs, and reminded me that in time, life is bound to improve.