Don't Surrender Spring

Early spring in Texas, I tell myself every year, is the only reason anybody lives in Texas.

I’m exaggerating, of course — you know I love this place — but seriously, in a state that attempts to roast me alive for roughy 60 percent of the year and robs me of a genuine fall or proper winter, March to sometime in early April is the shining seasonal jewel that briefly makes up for all the rest.

And it seems like it happens all at once, doesn’t it? At least in the Houston area. Dead, dead dead — alive. Suddenly, one day, the neighborhood is green. A little at first, then a lavish lot; everything alive and electric, immediately. Almost nothing makes me happier than those first few days like that.

My gut reaction to the coronavirus pandemic, since it started, has been grief. It seems like the world is revolving around death: literal and figurative, big and small. We are all in a collective state of loss. Just one thing after the other being taken away.

So I was surprised when I noticed, around the same time all of it started, as I was driving along the road from picking up a few things at my house to go back to my quarantine quarters at my parents’ — whoa.

It was happening again.

The trees that had been barren a few weeks (days? hours?) ago were covered in bright green, tender leaves.

The sky was perfect blue.

The sun was streaming in all over, breaking through all that greenery and lighting it up, drawing flowers up through the dirt.

My first thought was that it felt jarring and wrong, almost, for things to be beautiful when everything is so heavy. It almost feels like it should be winter until this over; like no days this good or this beautiful deserve to be wasted on a time like this.

But immediately after, I realized: I was allowing grief to take over things I hadn’t even lost yet.

That I didn’t have to lose.

I made two lists that same night. The first was everything I was anticipating losing as a result of coronavirus. Things I could lose. Things I was afraid of losing.

It was long. It filled an entire page.

The second list, though, was everything I had actually lost as a result of coronavirus so far.

And you know what?

That list was a lot shorter.

There were some significant things on that second list, to be sure. Not nearly as significant as others, I know; but the existence of a bigger loss doesn’t diminish a smaller one. Loss is loss. It still hurts.

But finally snapping out of my focus on that to see the green growing around me made me realize how much I stood to lose not because of any virus at all, but because of the way I was letting it take over my mind and emotions. There was still so much in my control, and I didn’t want to use that power to give up the good things still available to me. In a season of loss, why surrender more?

There is a lot of hard and heavy and dying in the world right now. But don’t miss all the life growing, glowing, green and bright and new. It’s there. It doesn’t care. It’s growing anyway.

I needed that.

Figured maybe someone else might, too.

(Photos from a defiant off-road bike adventure with my dad, soon after. Because this gorgeous spring bayou is still ours for the taking, in all its normal, early-spring glory.)