The First Day of Spring

      Today was the first day of Spring. While the there are bits of new green sprouting out of the earth, it did not feel like Spring at all. But, it was not winter either. March, in these parts, is kind of an in between month. The flora is thinking about coming back to life but for the most part things are dull and dormant. The air is not as cold as winter, but there is still a rawness to it. It is in between.

     The transition from Summer to Fall to Winter seems to be a more natural and continuous progression to me. The world is in full bloom and gradually dies or goes dormant. The transition for Winter to Spring somehow seems more abrupt and a bigger change. I am not sure why I even view things this way.
     This is not to say that Spring is not a gradual blooming and not a gradual change from colder days to warmer days. Perhaps, I am looking at birth and rebirth as being more of an abrupt change than the growing and eventually withering away.
     I tried to see if there was anything close to my odd view of things in a web search. Needless to say, there is nothing close. Most of the quotes, poems, and other bits I found in the transition from Winter to Spring were welcoming the rebirth and warmth that is the promise of the season. In my comments here, I am not disparaging the arrival of spring. I do indeed look forward to the Summer that it brings and am quite content to leave Winter behind. As a schoolboy, Spring was the promise of the beginning of the baseball season and the end of the school year. Both were good things.
     Maybe, I am grappling with the same sentiment that T. S. Eliot opened The Waste Land with:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

     I remember how these lines resonated with me when I first read them. The rest of the famous poem was a let down by comparison. The breeding of lilacs and the spring rains stirring the dead roots is a good thing. That is the view most have… if and when they think about such.
     Perhaps, there is something very Armenian in my genetic coding. Of course, I like and embrace this notion. In days of old, March was a time of scarcity. All the reserves of the harvest were running low. It was a time of austerity, a time to persevere until things could be planted and trees would blossom. It is no small coincidence that Lent is such a heavy, somber, reflective time in the Armenian Church. We tend to lament more than others, and March is peak season for such. And I try to do my part…