I love the prevernal season perhaps best of all: that space between the start of spring and before the leafing out of the big, green world. There's such a brief series of moment between the last dregs of winter and first flush of spring, snow and daffodils, or sub-zero nights and thunderstorm afternoons. All show us that there is no line between seasons, just a two-steps-forward, four-steps-back, one-leap-forth, and a-crash-to-the-cold-ground dance.
Last night, I was acutely aware of this when we took a sunset walk across part of the field, up the hill, and through the woods, all the trees so dry that we were snapping off interfering branches as we went to make the trail more of a trail. Yet in the middle of this drought moment, there sky exhaled humidity, and for the first time in days, I didn’t feel so thirsty. The clouds cleared, the sky darkened, and over the horizon of time and weather, finally some rain arrived at 4 a.m.
Having woken myself up from a nightmare in which I was the entire KU men’s basketball team, rushing around my house to lock all the doors against impending danger, I sat up in time to see lightning in the distance. I stayed up, convincing myself I wasn’t fragmented in all those star basketball players but just one woman watching the world change to rain.
This prevernal time in Kansas is famous for bringing us all four seasons in a day, so I don’t hold onto what sweet, damp, and shining weather is given to us at this moment, but maybe that’s one of the great meanings of in-between times. Change is coming, following an old pattern but unfurling in its own mysterious way. It’s outside of my control, but at least, I can still keep going outside, the air — whatever temperature it is — remembering me to who I am beyond my ideas about myself, and helping me remember what’s real.
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