My mother was an intelligent woman. She spoke seven languages and claimed to have read the great works of Russian literature in Russian, her second language, by the time she was twelve. But she wasn’t a profound thinker or doer. Raising four sons isn’t nothing but she felt more comfortable as a spectator than a participant in life.
However, I came across something she wrote in her diary many years ago while she was experiencing a bout with depression. I’m not sure what brought it on except that she lived a daydream driven life and reality had an unpleasant way of intruding on her expectations.
“I always think of the futility of life,” she wrote. “Nothing lasts and nothing really matters. Yet, it’s so wonderful to be alive.”
That thought encapsulates not just her personality but also the current moment for me. Bad things are happening with, I fear, worse to come. Yet spring, my favorite season, is on the way. The air is filled with birdsong at first light. Maybe I’m just grasping at straws but I’ve noticed the insinuation of buds on the maple tree outside my office window. Usually it takes a wash of green across the forest before I’m ready to acknowledge spring’s awakening.
It’s not that I’ve become more observant. If only that were so! I just happened to be walking through the woods with our dog — when in doubt a dog, especially a young dog, offers free lessons in the joy of living — and was surprised to spot the slender buds on a birch tree that was about to hit me in the face.
Spring in the northeast can break your heart. A few warm days in succession gives false hope, only for the weather to turn wet and raw into April and even early May. I particularly recall my senior year in college when Vermont turned so temperate for twenty-four hours or so that students, bundled in down parkas just the previous day, were lounging on the lawn in front of my dorm in shorts, t-shirts and even bikinis. I couldn’t wait to return from spring break. This is going to be bliss, I thought. By the way, there’s a form of euphoria peculiar to the final semester of high school and college. Your work all or mostly done and nothing but open road ahead you can feel your body sighing and your soul expanding. But it rained almost until graduation day.
I asked AI whether there’s a springtime equivalent of Indian Summer, a false spring so to speak, where the temperature briefly spikes only to plummet. AI’s answer was “false spring.” I don’t know what I’m paying this guy for?
I probably owe my mother a debt of gratitude. She was born with a childlike attitude towards the world that could be alternately magical and maddening. If one were being uncharitable you could describe it as untreatable immaturity. She was the most stubborn person I ever met and treated her children like dolls over whom she exercised despotic control to groom and dress as she liked; as the oldest I bore the brunt of her schemes. But she was also perennially alive to wonder and I like to think that she passed that down to us.
Whether it’s a warm, unanticipated breeze or a superb piece of pastry we inherited from her the ability to be in the moment. I’ve been reasonably fortunate in life — I’ve never faced the hardship that is the default condition for many across the planet — but luck, except perhaps of the genetic sort, can’t explain everything.
There are those who were born with silver, if not golden, spoons in their mouths who are perennially dissatisfied, who think the world is stacked against them, who see enemies everywhere. At the moment we’re living under the tightening grip of one such damaged personality. So what’s the response? What are we supposed to do about it?
What’s so infuriating (there are new outrages every day so take your pick) is that these assaults seem designed to inflict a view of the world, onto sycophants and skeptics alike, that spits hate and nihilism in the face of love and beauty. Desecrating the Earth, denying food and medicine to the desperate, teaching us to suspect each other and assume the worst, sadly appeals to something as rooted in the human psyche as faith and altruism. Spring’s promise, they seem to be saying, is for fools.
But the freedom to choose which version of reality best conforms to ones’ beliefs remains ours. Lincoln’s words in the Gettysburg Address are rumbling around the many recesses in my head. It’s up to us, if you’ll allow me to paraphrase Lincoln with an assist from the Declaration of Independence, to rededicate ourselves to the cause of freedom and the pursuit of happiness. There are various ways to do so but they start with belief in the human spirit, the confidence that love not hate is what we came here for.
I fear that belief is only starting to be tested. But spring is also young and soon it will bloom in profusion.
Ralph Gardner Junior is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found in the Berkshire Eagle and on Substack.
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