Vernal

After a week, month of turbulent gloom, both literally and metaphorically, I awake early Saturday morning to the sun glowing through the closed blinds and a cat lying on my stomach purring. I’ve reached the stage in life where you sleep with the window open no matter the weather and I lie for a few minutes, hours listening to a robin warbling sweetly in the small strip of lawn between my window and the street. Peace.

I don’t sleep much anymore but it’s felt like a months, years of sleepy winter this time, while I’ve cocooned in my room, often my bed, escaping the world into work, mechanical tasks, formulaic books, soft things, quiet noises. I wasn’t sad or anxious. I wasn’t afraid or depressed. I wasn’t anything at all.

But this Saturday, the pit of my stomach warms. I stir an egg into yogurt in the kitchen, a swirl of maple syrup, a scrape of lemon, while Nina Simone sings Sinnerman and my feet can’t stop moving. I drop each blueberry on one by one, making a pattern like a rising sun, filling it in until it pleases me and then put it in the oven to transform.

I’m half deaf at the moment, my left ear stopped by some unexpected spring cold or the relentlessness of years of headphoned meetings. It’s a strange and disorienting affliction. Noises come from unexpected angles. I don’t know how big a space I fill. I’ve been waiting it for it to clear and the sounds to come rushing back, but I hear only an ever-more insistent buzz. I imagine my ear as an angry punk rock band playing its only song in a neverending crescendo. The irony of this, is that it has been a week about listening hard. I am grateful for two ears.

I don’t sleep much anymore and I miss my dreams. But this Saturday morning, I dream that I want things and those things are elsewhere. I eat my breakfast thinking about boarding a plane to England, driving through fields of Texas bluebonnets, dipping my toes into the ice-cold spring Atlantic, powering a kayak through a salt marsh, skating down a still frozen river while singing Joni Mitchell. Spring is for going places. Spring is for song. I’m half deaf at the moment but I’m getting better. I’m grateful for two years of peace.

But spring is for going places and my feet can’t stop moving toward the rising sun.