Everything is set for Spring

Everything is set for Spring except the weather.

I stepped out this morning, as I do every morning, sometime after 7 AM, knowing that it had been cold overnight, knowing that we had, for a change, not benefitted from a cloud-cover insulating layer, expecting some of the more delicate spring buds to look a bit less robust than they had yesterday. I didn’t expect a skein of ice on the wheelbarrow that had absorbed Saturday’s half-inch rain storm.

All the signs of the season had been promising Spring for the last week or two: chilly but not freezing temperatures overnight, warm (60 - 70) days. Even the birds and frogs were saying it was time. I should have known the season hadn’t really taken hold, though. The humming birds, that for years have arrived on April 30 to serenade my wife on her birthday, didn’t show up until May had begun. Still, Ice? And the forecast for tonight is for temperatures in the twenties! Not fair in this time of global warming, yet there are the numbers on the recording thermometer.

Of course the warming is happening, just not all at once. The weather is unsettled, not simply tracing a new graph with a single direction. That’s to be expected as scientists experiment with new ways of holding the line (not reversing it) so that change happens at a speed we can deal with and prepare for.

It’s much the same with writing, let me tell you. Some days the words just won’t stop flowing, and they are good words, too. Other days I have to use all my available energy to tease the thoughts out of my creative corner and see them show up on the page. That doesn’t mean I have no more ideas, or that the ideas aren’t worth pursuing. It does mean, though, that time is having its way with the creativity nodes. I perhaps don’t process the things I see and hear quite as quickly as I used to. I recognize that there is a time yet to come when the creative juices will slow and perhaps stop. That doesn’t mean I should give up, of course, or put my mind on slow. It really means that I’d best be aware of the possibility of change, of longer incubation times for ideas, or of shorter periods available for working with the ideas I do have. Change, like Spring, will come.

I embrace it and make it my own.