Sitting in Spring
The trails are muddy. The snow’s not great. We’ve had three different springs this year and the trails are unreliable at best; now I know exactly how much I actually rely on them.
But this third spring also means sunlight streaming through the living room window. In a fit of the kind of energy reserved for this time of year, my boys rearranged the furniture so the best reading chairs are facing out that window and towards the mountains. The light comes through even later because of the time change.
Spring has always been billed as a renewal, birth, cleaning. Sitting in this season is not the instinct and it’s not easy. As much as we separate ourselves from nature the minute we close the door, there’s no denying how we all want to get out and feel the fun on our faces and shoulders after winter. Being inside while such solar energy is closely present seems so wrong.
But watching the birds do their things and sing their songs was the only thing possible during a week-long flu. It took a lot to walk from bed to kitchen so there wasn’t any possibility of skiing in shorts or running in a tank top. Instead, it was sitting in the chair that faces the mountains through the picture window with a book in my hand. I couldn’t do much more than sit, read a few pages of a book, and imitate the cat that I would love to have but can’t. I closed my eyes, did a slow blink. Stretched a little bit. Read a few lines. Didn’t fight the quiet command of my brain to put the book down and curl to one side.
So I sat and I watched the sun. It turned my eyelids orange when I closed them. It made the normal leg-blanket I have while reading wholly unnecessary. It let me pull my chair closer to the window, where it normally couldn’t have worked because of the woodstove. But there was no need to burn any logs, only exist in a slice of interstellar light.
It’s awfully hard to sit when there are so many trails and so many adventures and so many mountains that I haven’t set foot on despite living here for three years. But when sitting is a must, the early spring sun is an awfully good place to do it.
