beginnings

Could It Possibly, Possibly Be?

Standard

We had one very warm day, and now it’s cooler again, but it seems inescapable: spring is in the air. Except for a few stubborn patches, the snow is gone, a few random piles of black, gritty ice stubbornly holding on, but they know their time is nearly up.

There are blue skies and brown grass, but the grass won’t stay that way for long. I haven’t seen the buds yet in the trees, but they’re coming. You can feel it.

This winter wasn’t as brutal as last winter, as ceaseless, as ready to take your soul and pack it away in the deep freeze. But still it saps you, the continuous cold under bleak clouds.

Spring is about beginnings. It’s about newness, about freshness. Spring is the mud you gather when you get going, the windburned cheeks and numb fingertips you know are a promise of warmth to come. Spring is seeds and tentative flowers and trees alive with crowded beauty.

Spring takes the browns and the beiges and paints the earth alive with color. It lets everything be new. It lets us be new.

Check out  my full-length novels,  Her Cousin Much Removed,  The Great Paradox and the Innies and Outies of Time Management and Aunty Ida’s Full-Service Mental Institution (by Invitation Only), and the sequel, Aunty Ida’s Holey Amazing Sleeping Preparation (Not Doctor Recommended) which is now available!

Sign up for my spamless newsletter. And download Better Living Through GRAVY and Other Oddities, it’s free!

Advertisement

Beginnings and Endings and Round Again

Standard

Today I have beginnings and endings on my mind. Endings, because as of tomorrow, Yahoo! Contributor Network, the place where I’ve written now for three years, is no more. My pieces–along with everyone else’s–will vanish from the internet, hardly leaving a ripple in their wake.

And beginnings because, on Tuesday night, a friend of mine had a baby girl, her second. Her name is Isabel, and she arrived into this world weighing more than eight pounds.

It’s the way of the world, isn’t it? Around us, everywhere, things are starting and finishing, winding up and winding down. You can pick out a person passing by on the sidewalk, any person, and in his or her life, there are any given number of things somewhere along the path.

Maybe it’s because we have them built into our very essence that they resonate around us. Every day has the beginning of a sunrise; every day the ending of a sunset. It’s the rhythm of life, the balance of the universe.

Just the way that beginnings, eventually, lead to endings, endings can give way to beginnings, in that infinity circle. We’ll see where this ending takes me, but right now, I prefer to think of Isabel’s beginning, still sparkling fresh and sweetly bright.

Need something to read? Check out  Her Cousin Much Removed,  The Great Paradox and the Innies and Outies of Time Management and Aunty Ida’s Full-Service Mental Institution (by Invitation Only) .

 Sign up for my spamless newsletter. And download Better Living Through GRAVY and Other Oddities, it’s free!

The Lingering of Last

Standard

Last, itself contains the whole tale. We know from simply that single word that there are times that have come before; we also know that those times will not come again.

We count firsts, we catalog them, document them, but the thing about lasts is that we don’t know, when we experience them, that that’s what they’ll be. They crystallize into what they are only later, long after the moment is gone, so we have to piece them together in order to remember them.

There’s something inherently wistful about the word “last,” it implies attention not paid and instances squandered. It contains another L-word, “loss,” because it tells us that what once was will never be.

There are good lasts, of course. Last day with braces, last payment on a car, last item on the to-do list, but even with those good ones, it’s not the last, itself, that shines. It’s not the last that makes it good.

It’s the first that’s next to come.

Like a mystery? Try Her Cousin Much Removed. Or download Better Living Through GRAVY and Other Oddities. It’s free!

Longing for more? Sign up for my newsletter.