It must be spring

By Bobby Neal Winters

I am looking out my window at a scene and I’ve a feeling I’ve seen it all before. It is as if I am riding on a merry go round and I see the golden ring circling by.

There is a bright red cardinal sitting and singing on a branch of the oak tree out my window.  There is snow on the ground so white as to hurt your eyes.  The sky--not a cloud in it--is a shade of blue that words are insufficient to convey.

And it is 15 degrees Fahrenheit outside.

It must be spring.

The fans of science fiction talk about time travel.  Theoretical physicists will talk of time dilation in the theory of relativity, both special and general.  The poet will say “You can’t go home again.”

But people of a certain age know that time travel is possible.  We call it memory.

During the course of the last year, Jean’s mother has passed away.  Jean has dealt with probate, with the cleaning of her mother’s house, with the disposal of belongings from ancestors unmet and unknown.  She has dealt with a lifetime of detritus. But close your eyes, and it was just a moment ago.

We don’t remember a continuous stream of things.  We remember events.  We remember certain events because they were joyful or--more likely--painful. We revisit them for the same reason.  They are things that don’t obey normal arithmetic.

Jean’s mother passed away on May 1.  Blink and that will be here. Yet--in some strange way--that event seems closer than Christmas.  The portion of time from July 4 until now seems to have lasted ten years, but Janet died only a minute ago.

We go on.

When our parents are alive, we pull away from them in rebellion.  We must do this to assert our own individuality, to be our own beings.  But when they pass away, we don’t have to do that any longer.  We gain freedom to become more like them because we are not in danger of getting lost within them.  We can be more like them and still be ourselves.

It’s complicated.  My father has been dead for more than 35 years, but I’ve only caught myself being more like him recently. 

It started a while back, I am sure, but I’ve only been seeing it truly manifest recently. I suppose this is because with the death of the last of Jean’s and my parents we’ve only now truly become the adults in the room.

We’ve no one to defer to; we’ve no one to seek for a final opinion; we are alone and in charge.

It is terrifying.

Then you think that they must’ve felt the same way too, and they made it.  So, you think, maybe we will too.

Events can be far and near because we roll our memories up like a string of Christmas lights.  They are far apart in the calendar, but near to hand in the roll. And often tangled.

But the merry go round keeps on turning.  Soon the flowers will bloom and the summer will come. And we will have to mow. Again.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )