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06/01/2017 12:01 AMThis is my happiest time of year. This is when I can’t stop counting my blessings. This is when I put away the light box to help me with my SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder), slow it down, and begin noticing everything around me, eagerly anticipating all that lies ahead in these wonderful early days of spring-into-summer, instead of praying for winter to end.
I’ve lost my innocence about a lot of things over the years, but never my innocence about my mother-nature.
As a child growing up in the ’60s in a New York suburb before housing development began springing up all over, and before today’s constant electronic distractions, I spent all my free time outdoors in woods and parks. I remember getting so excited by little things like the Canada geese that landed in the reservoir next to our house every spring, like clockwork, where they would build a nest, lay their eggs, raise their babies, and, like clockwork, fly south with their new family every fall.
I learned as a child that there were things you could depend on—that no matter how much human beings screwed things up, Mother Nature would come through in all her glory, so resilient, so beautiful, so hopeful, so spirit-lifting.
Our children grew up in the same kinds of valley-shoreline towns before screen life had taken over real life, where they could roam freely on the most beautiful, preserved/protected land—Bushy Hill Nature Preserve in Essex, Chatfield Hollow in Killinworth, West Woods in Guilford, the Supply Ponds in Branford, and on and on—where they learned to get quiet and tune into the sights, sounds, and smells around them, to stray from the path, but still find their way home, without GPS.
We live in a 24/7 constantly changing news cycle. We live in a world where you can get every kind of fresh fruit and vegetable any time of year in the supermarket, and purchase everything imaginable any time of day or night online. All the lines are blurred and time ceases to exist in any clearly delineated way.
But there is one thing we can depend on with certainty and clarity here in New England: the four seasons. No matter how rough a winter, no matter how beat up by snow and ice, the crocus will come up, followed by daffodils, tulips, forsythia, lilacs, snow drops, azaleas, rhododendron, tiger lilies, hydrangea, daisies…and that’s all by early June and just on our one little half-acre of property!
I know I live in one of the most magnificent places on earth. It never ceases to amaze me and fill me with wonder. And with everything else I grouse and gripe about, the privilege of living where I live is one thing for which I will always be grateful.
Well, with one exception: Winter.
It’s gray and cold and endless around here. And people that aren’t lucky enough to get out of Dodge aren’t all that sociable, hibernating until spring, and I really do hate it. I know there are nice things about winter, they just happen to elude me personally the older I get.
There is controversy about whether contrasts are necessary in order to feel true appreciation—the old Yankee mentality that you have to brave it through winter’s bone-chilling dreariness to embrace the spring in all its glory. Suffering for the rewards, no pain, no gain.
Boomers I know have picked up and moved south and say they had no problem adapting to warm weather year-round. You get used to not shoveling the driveway really fast.
Even though our younger son has made Florida his home, I don’t think I could live there full-time. I couldn’t stand the sweltering summers. But mostly—although I hope we can retire someday and spend part of the winter in warmer climes—I’d miss the anticipation and excitement of each unfolding new season.
Every day it seems we put on the news and are presented with another negative, unexpected, unprecedented (the new word ad nauseam) event. Nothing seems to make sense, have a rhyme, or a reason.
But I look out my window and sunlight is bouncing off the water in the marsh, glittering and casting dancing shadows among the verdant green leaves of the giant old maples. I can smell the pungent basil and peppermint I just planted, and hear the strong, joyful chorus of a dozen different birds. I can walk outside barefoot and hatless and feel the warm earth under my feet, and the warm breeze blowing through my hair.
And somehow, all really is right with the world.
Amy J. Barry is a Baby Boomer, who lives in Stony Creek with her husband and assorted pets. She writes reviews for Shore Publishing newspapers and is an expressive arts educator. Contact her at www.aimwrite-ct.net.