Spring in Minnesota — a Mother’s Day reflection
May has come to Minnesota, and, surprisingly, it has taken me by surprise.
The symphonic grandeur of spring in the Pacific Northwest had caused me to completely forget the quiet crescendo of spring here in the Midwest.
There, spring was celebratory and explosive — all bright colors, flowers bursting forth in rich profusion, pink cherry blossoms blanketing the streets like the chapel train of a wedding gown.
Here, spring is less celebration and more resurrection — a Lazarus season, with the world quietly blinking its eyes as it peers forth from the slumbering, moribund earth. The bone grey fingers of the trees slowly cover with green buds, the animals come out tentatively, the brown grasses start to show whispers of green, and the silent sky day by day fills with a growing chorus of birdsong. It does not burst upon you; it builds slowly, just as night turns slowly into day.
Perhaps most surprising is the way the trees here gradually fill out and become a protective canopy over our lives. In the Pacific Northwest — and, in its own way in northern Minnesota where we used to live — the pines stand self-contained and solitary, pointing skyward with an almost palpable indifference to the human. Even where they join together to form tunnels and pathways, their focus is upward, and any human or animal activity that takes place beneath them does so on its own terms, with no feeling that the trees care for them or have any concern for the lives taking place beneath their branches.
But here the elms and maples and oaks and all the others spread their branches almost maternally over the streets and boulevards. They seem to look down on you rather than asking you to look upward. They make you feel cared for and protected.
I’ve always loved trees in an unreflective way. I had favorite trees as a child, special trees as meeting places, trees I loved to climb and branches where I loved to sit. I knew nothing of their various species or place in the ecological order. They were just my companions, sometimes recognized, sometimes taken for granted — and, like so much else in life, never truly appreciated until, for some reason, they were gone.
As I got older, I wrote about them, I sculpted them, I got to know them in ways both intimate and abstract. But always I felt their presence in my life. Now we are back here where I was born and raised and I am feeling their presence strongly once again.
There is no doubt that I miss our Oregon home. The abundance and profusion of the Pacific Northwest makes you feel like you are living in a garden. But here, where the landscape is subtler and the vegetation more nuanced, the trees rustling in the breeze and the dawn chorus of birdsong outside the window make their own special music. It may not be symphonic, but it builds and crescendoes in a song of gratitude that has you waking with a smile on your face and thinking, “Damn, it’s good to be alive!”
And who could ever ask for more than that?
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