Dear Reader,

I like things that are distinctly whatever they are.  I like things that have an intense, unambiguous identity.  For this reason, I have in the past been a bit torn on the concept of spring.

Summer is the paradise of seasons; it offers up every inch of land and sea as an oblation to our sun-drenched happiness.  Then autumn, sharp and golden and unmistakable, descends with utter confidence.  And winter! the most acute of all seasons holds in its frigid hands the power to remake the world overnight and to recast life as a battle between the cold, glorious outside and the hot, glorious fireside.  

But spring?  What is spring?  Spring is sort of a tweener.  It is often soggy, sometimes mushy.  Its colors are pale.  It is budded and bloomed but not really grown.   Spring is indecisive: we had high sixties over Easter week, but two days ago I awoke to a dusting of snow on the ground.  Spring is like winter and summer left in a blender for a moment, but not long enough to mix smoothly.    

I always valued the fact that spring held the (dubious) distinction of marking my birthday each year, but I historically found little else distinct about it.  Spring was probably my least favorite season.  That has all changed now.

Early in my marriage, on a soft springy day, I was cooking dinner for (among other people) my grandmother and my wife.   The former, born in Italy, was the archetypo of the Italian grandmother cook.  And, though I’m unclear how the genetics work on this, my wife seems to have inherited her culinary gifts.   The two women were next to one another in the kitchen, a few feet back from me — watching.  The heat was high.  Oil was splattering.  There were buckets of spices, oceans of cream, the remains of an epicurean world war on the counter.   Shoulder to shoulder the two women stood, looking on.   My back was to them, but I’m certain that two heads were slowly shaking in unison.  Finally, the older woman said to the younger, “He cooks like a man.”

I recount this not to join in belittling my sex, nor even my cooking (though that might be warranted), but to observe that in the first decades of my life on through the first months of my marriage, I had little appreciation for a thing called subtlety.   Opening my eyes took the patient influence of marriage and, specifically, the patient influence of my specific wife. 

Spring is like her.   Though beautiful, it is restrained.  From hidden fertility, it births all that makes summer verdant and autumn abundant.  Spring is neither too hot nor too cold, that new life, while young and tender, might thus be cradled in perfect warmth.  Spring can thunderstorm if it needs to, but most of its work is accomplished through moderate sunshine and silent rain.  Spring will not force itself on you; it will not even pursue you; it knows its own worth well enough to let you learn to pursue it.

Spring, in a word, is subtle.  And there lies its power.  God was not in the wind nor the earthquake nor the fire but in the whisper.  Almost without our noticing, spring creates the life that will fill the new year and defeats the death that ended the old — no one should be surprised if God chose to be both conceived and resurrected in spring. 

I missed most of that for most of my life.  My wife, like spring slowly awakening the world, slowly awakened me.  This was largely done through a thousand subtle actions of her own, but occasionally through more blunt verbal instruments like unto those of her grandmother-in-law.  In any case, it seems to have (mostly) worked, and I’m glad of it.  Sometimes less is more.  Sometimes too much, it turns out, is too much.  I still probably cook like a man, but I no longer cook like a piquant brute.   And spring, I can definitively say, is now one of my four favorite seasons.

Sincerely,