Spring

http://polaroid41.com/spring/

Wednesday April 8th, 2020 – 2:48pm.

In Crown Heights, on New York Avenue between President and Union Street, my very dear friend Sarah stumbles upon a quote from Pablo Neruda that has been scratched into the sidewalk:

“They can cut all the flowers, but they can never stop spring.”

She thinks it’s probably been there for a while, but she never noticed it before. Maybe because she didn’t need it until now. She sends it to me.

It’s the spring of 2020 and for the first time in the 15+ years I’ve lived in France, what we’re going through here is also what my friends and family are going through in the US. A paradoxically shared and separate experience : quarantine, isolation, confinement, distance. We are in our fourth week with no clear end in sight.

In France, life started changing with the announcement of school closures on March 12th. According to the calendar, March 12th is still winter. In fact, just the week before that, I remember going to a school council meeting all bundled up in my warmest boots and an oversized sweater, braving sleet and rain. At that meeting the question of school closures was discussed as a distant and unlikely event. Little did we know…

In the weeks we’ve been inside, Spring has come. My favorite season. This preference might come from my midwestern roots….there is nothing like the joy of spring after a long, harsh Minnesota winter. Or it might be the Parisian in me…because there is also nothing quite like the joy of spring after the dreary, gray damp and the oppressive low cloud cover of winter in Île-de-France. Either way : spring is my season. Spring is for falling in love, for stretching sleepy winter limbs, for starting over. Spring is our chance to see nature burst forth in all of her splendor and to witness her unstoppable, audacious blooming. There is a ‘rushing’ energy, not in the sense of hurrying but like the rushing of a mountain stream: cold, sparkling and swollen from the thaw.

Across the street from our apartment there is a big, beautiful park which is currently gated and closed. From our windows I can see the grass is growing much longer than usual and among the green, I spy hundreds of white wild daisies. At the center of the park, too far for us to see from home, there is a park within the park called “le jardin japonais” or the Japanese Gardens. I keep thinking about the cherry trees, they must be ablaze in a riot of pink right now. They’re blooming just like every year, indifferent to the fact that we aren’t there to admire them.

There’s something ironic about being trapped inside as nature roars to life outside our windows and there’s something comforting about spring’s disregard for the current state of human affairs. Yes, you can cut all the flowers, but you can never stop spring.