Everything is awake now. Even the things that you had no idea were asleep, they’ve woken up and are illuminated by the early sun. The warmth and color of the season are enough to bring anyone outdoors until they’re basking in yet don’t exactly notice the grand stretch at day’s end. The type of experience that makes it easy to drop into bed feeling as though you’ve just accomplished a day well lived.  The leaves on a quad of trees sitting outside my apartment windows, when I forgot to spend my days scowling at their bare bones, now they’ve got expanding greens. From one branch, the remnant of an Easter decorative pennant slowly moves in the breeze. The party is over and everyone is out beyond their doors. Just when you were about to wonder how much longer the underground season could last. 

I noted quite a bit last month that I was in a staring contest with the wisteria trees. Like nature’s watched pot, they didn’t do their thing until I of course blinked first. Then of course while I found myself wrapped up in my own self-centered minutiae, that’s when they bloomed. The plants just do what they’re supposed to do without any regard for the rest of us. In the end, it’s not so much a two-sided staring contest but more a contest between one who is battling herself. 

And I love the wisteria for what they remind me of. Most times of the year, they are a tangle of brown and desiccated-looking eyesores. Kind of like the key stick work that used to line the frog pond where we used to play growing up. You couldn’t beat it, you just had to maneuver your way past it until you got through to the other side. And the wisteria, or glicine in Italian, they are something of the same for most of the year. You hardly think they are alive, and an untrained eye almost makes one wonder why the owner doesn’t just clear them out.

But then they do their thing, and you almost find yourselves apologizing to the ephemera as spring stops you dead in the street. How did that get there? Why am I so myopic on almost every other day of the year? Really after experiencing this sort of awakening for so many springs now, you would think that I’d have learned by now.  

As I work to savor each one of these days, I do feel a tinge of sadness as the wisteria is now past its peak bloom and the delicate lavender is starting to drop away. I feel a tiny bit sad yet also appreciative. I can tell that Mother Nature is often the one force that can reach the center of my brain and encourage me along throughout the year. 

It’s funny how we look at various representations of transition differently. In terms of right now, I want to take what I see and view like I once did on a television screen. Our first VCR that used to sit on top of the television in our 70s brown living room. Press down on the pause button to study each frame in its shaky suspense carefully. Because I know that once I just let it go, everything will be gone again before I know it. 

I had old friends visiting last month, friends that are only just a tiny bit further down the road than I am. “It just keeps going faster,” they warned me, “just you wait.”  There is no pause button—just as I know that there is no fast forward button—even during those moments where that’s all I think I really want.

With the improving climate and floral show, the crowds have also returned to Rome. I see them in the increasingly snarled vehicular traffic, as well as the impressive line that snakes around the Vatican City walls. The pots of azaleas are in place on the Spanish Steps, and now the best time to pass through there and the nearby Trevi Fountain is the early morning. Otherwise we are all outdoors, awake and starved for easy come/easy go renewal.

I’m with them. I’m completely with the outdoor masses and now awake enough to know that I will ultimately take my hand off the pause button and slip through these months before I even realize what is happening.  Maybe this is the kind of awake that lets a person know that it is more than okay to fall back into reverie. For this is the time of year where the colors are too good to miss, the nature-made comfort providing the optimal dose of balance that will walk you through to whatever’s next.