Fresh air

April 10, 2005

I appreciate winter. I turn on to spring. I don’t feel seasonal affective disorder, but that might be because I don’t feel much between the last warm day of autumn and the first of spring. It’s never been a problem, but this weekend has been like waking into a dream. The Matrix’s red pill. Brazil. The struggle to awaken from a technology induced stupor, and that stupor is a dark one. The sun is something completely different. And temperatures that suggest the equivalence of indoors and outdoors. People are reading on the grass when only weeks before they had been wrapped in blankets close to clanking radiators. People bring their laptops onto porches, stoops, and parks. The first day of spring makes the distopian fantasies of our darker days seem to be overly dramatic. 1984? 2005? Every twelve months the sun reappears and warms the earth. Orwell needed to get out more. Marx spent too much time in England. Political cynicism and a cultivated air of negativity can wait a few more months before they again start to make sense. I’ll be outdoors.

I spent a weekend dedicated to the potential of this season. I helped Emily* pick up her new bicycle and already excited promises about exploring the city have been shared. We put on climbing shoes and pretended we were climbers—discovering in an afternoon of bouldering that perhaps we are. I’m taking a break between bouts of laundry and spring cleaning to reinvigorate this lapsed blog.

Springtime. New beginnings. My father, the devout atheist, has a childish love of Easter eggs. It’s their shape. Their feel in the hand and the possibility of life within.

Springtime.


*I don't know whether pseudonyms are necessary. But they'll do for now.