It appears as if I left Alaska in winter and I came back a few weeks later to spring.
It wasn’t the sunny weather though that signified the start of the new season. Nor was it the official date on the calendar, warming temperatures, melting ice, dry roads, sound of trickling water, and obvious change in the air.
No, I knew it was spring because my hibernating cat resumed her place at the window and is now longing to go outside.
Big, mournful, pitiful meows that echo all of my desires to join her outside in the sun.
It’s contagious, and I often find myself joining her there, promising her that the time is near.
After my three week stint in California and my brief reconnection with the sun and how it felt on my Alaskan winter skin, my excitement for spring has only grown stronger.
It’s not just the warmer weather that I’m looking forward to though, or the ditching of the layers and the unearthing of all my shorts and summer dresses. It’s the change of seasons and it’s appropeitness to the change I’m about to go through.
We talk of spring as a rebirth, a changing of the seasons, a time when the cold winter thaws and the hibernating landscape bursts forth with color and life.
Not that I’ve been hibernating the last six months under a thick layer of ice and snow (but I sort of have), but I have been in a comfortable place and I’m about to shed those known layers, like the ice over this once frozen landscape, and step out into the light.
So to speak.
It’s time for a new change of seasons, and I couldn’t have picked a more opportune moment.
It’s a change of seasons I’m ambivalent about, for sure, for I fight with the desire to stay in my comfort zone and the urge to go into the unknown.
My response to people when they often ask why I would leave such a haven, a place where I’m successful and happy, is simply: a comfort zone is beautiful, but nothing ever grows there.
I can feel it in my bones, like the trees thawing under the spring sun. It’s been simmering for awhile now, this feeling of awakening.
It’s springtime, but it’s also my time.
And thank you for dubbing it officially spring, Fudge!
