Imagine that the leaves have fallen. The trees are dead, stripped to spindly, ghostly tentacles. The sun rarely shines, but even the light is cold on your face. When you emerge from your house, the wind lashes you like fleas biting skin. The days are long but the nights longer. And it’s in those nights, in the darkness, the ever-pressing, all-encompassing lack of sight, that you first feel despair. 

Over time, winter steals the memory of warmth. You forget the sight of golden light glistening across living branches. Forget the smell of thunderstorms and the sounds of living creatures. The taste of sweet lemonade. 

Wrapped in the dark, the cold, and the silence, you believe, This is all that ever was and all that ever will be. 

And then one pre-dawn morning, your eyes still closed, you hear the song of returning birds. You step outside your door, and the air smells different—like rain and cut grass and your grandmother’s garden shed.

That smell of rich soil is ironically the smell of bacteria eating away the dead things of winter. But these trees, they were never dead, merely sleeping. And as their branches unfurl into green leaves and pink blossoms, you remember something else. The existence of what used to be and what will be again. 

 And inexplicably and swiftly as a zephyr, you feel something new—Hope. 

When we live inside our limited perception, we internalize lies about ourselves and our world. We live without memory and without hope. Even if deep down we know that spring will come and that no winter lasts forever, we don’t live as if it were true. We tell ourselves, This darkness (pain/grief/failure/longing/loneliness/ugliness) is all that ever was and all that ever will be.

I’ve recently been reading a book on the use of emotional craft in fiction. The author explains how it’s possible for readers to have true emotional experiences brought on by mere words on a page. One of the explanations is the use of detail. Details have the power to suggest memory to us and build situations that are “preloaded” with feeling.

The details of spring do that for me, reminding me of some of my strongest feelings. 

My father died in spring. My first baby was going to be due in the spring. The first foster child I ever loved and lost came and went in spring. My first date with my husband. My last school day. My mother’s worst hospital stay.

I smell spring and it’s a hammer blow of memory. And yet, the older I become the more I settle into the fact that spring is my favorite season. 

It seems remarkable that I don’t associate it with sadness. With thoughtfulness, yes. Solemnity. Gravity. But I can’t escape the beauty of how spring flips perceptions on its head. It’s the season that gives us Easter, and that empty tomb is the penultimate display of life where there was once death.

It’s natural for us to look at our world and grow cynical. In fact, if you have the wherewithal to look beyond your comfortable, suburban, American existence, you should feel that there’s something deeply, intrinsically wrong with this world, like an infection that’s made it all the way to the bone. You can smell it but you know the antibiotics aren’t working. 

It’s tempting to look at all the wrong that we can’t rationalize or repair and call it meaningless. Hopeless. Random. All that was and all that ever will be. But I would argue that this is the lazy intellectual route—to deny the existence of more simply because we can’t understand it.

 Spring isn’t like Santa Claus. It isn’t a fairy godmother or folklore, some story we tell our children to help them sleep at night. Spring is a phenomena that we witness again and again, cyclically and dependably. Just when we think we can’t take another day of flea-biting cold and weak light, the warmth returns. The birds sing.

For reasons I can’t fully justify, I love war movies like Dunkirk and 1917. Ninety-five percent of these films is composed of danger, death, despair, suffering. I mean, it’s a total slog.

So why do I sit through them? I’m pretty sure I endure just to get to those last few minutes—when the battle ends and the weapons are laid down, when the sacrifice is made and the closing song comes through in power, lifting like a sunrise, bringing with it redemption and meaning.

It makes the rest of the story worth the watch, the bad shifting the good in context. It wouldn’t be the same otherwise. We couldn’t understand the brilliance of light without the reality of darkness.

I don’t pretend to know the why behind the mechanics of suffering and death in this world. I can’t put a spin on it and rewrite the terrible truth. But every once in a while we catch glimpses of truth. Of a someday peace. Hope. Spring is a gift that we open every year, reminding us that winter is not forever. Cold is not permanent. Darkness exists to be shattered.

We live in a world with spring, and we endure because of it.