Patience

Prompt: Select a picture from a previous April

I have been so frustrated with the spring that just won't spring this year.  Winter clings for dear life when all I want is a lawn scattered with colorful tulips and blossoming trees.  I had nearly come to believe that we would never see spring this year when I came across this post which tells how I felt these same feelings in 2013.  The good news is that I wrote another post about a week to ten days later celebrating the flowers that filled my yard. Maybe spring 2018 really is just around the corner.

Wiping sleep from my eyes I grab my phone and pull up Accuweather.  The screen displays a temperature barely above freezing and the words, “It’s much colder than you’d like.”

I am so ready to feel the dirt in my fingers, to breathe in its rich smell of life. I’m ready to stroll the neighborhood and linger under the blooms of the crabapple on the corner.  I dream of the heady perfume from the row of lilac bushes on 19th Street.  I want to see the promise held in the blooms on the fruit trees out back.  Instead, I satisfy myself puttering amid the potted plants and seedlings which line the countertop of the mudroom.  I look through the windows and imagine the beauty waiting to emerge outside knowing spring would still my restlessness.

My mind drifts to other potential things waiting to blossom in my life.  My temporary job has been offered to me permanently.  I didn’t anticipate the offer and am not at all certain yet what my best response would be.  All three of my kids are sifting through options and potential plans to determine where they will be this fall.  Their decisions will affect the courses of their lives and might take some as far away as Paris.  So much potential lies waiting to make itself known in our lives.  Anxious to know the answers, I fidget through days that feel suspended in time.

Every season brings its own lesson if we are willing to learn.  The lesson of Spring 2013 would appear to be patience.