chasing the glimmers

cherry blossoms and fleeting seasons... and a writing prompt for paid subscrbers

When the cherry blossoms begin to let go so that green leaves can stand in their place, it looks like snow falling and blowing down the sidewalk. I’d forgotten to notice them with the pause they deserve, and now the show is nearly over. Spring is springing everywhere. It has been for nearly a month now, and I’ve noticed in a hurried way but not a real way. I was paused at a red light on the drive home from work last week and saw white petals falling like snow and blowing down the asphalt and realized I’d nearly missed it all.

Questions floating through my mind lately: What is truly urgent? What needs my hand and what needs me to step back and let it go? Lately I’m especially asking myself what I will miss one day that maybe I don’t even see right now, moments like cherry blossoms, here and then gone and blowing down the sidewalk like petals in the wind I cannot catch again.

Photo by Poorvi on Unsplash

I assigned “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” to one of my classes last week because it’s a required story in this particular unit of study. Truthfully, I don't really like it. The dissatisfied deathbed reflections, the annoyance at her own children tending to her, and the sting of this horrible thing that happened to her 60 years prior that she just can’t let go of. I love cathartic literature and tragic endings, but I just find this one depressing in a way that doesn't spur me to action but leaves me feeling flat and sad. I’ve read it many times, but there was a paragraph that leapt off the page at me as we read it in class together last week. She’s in and out of consciousness as death grows nearer, and her adult children are fussing around her, but internally she’s remembering her younger years in frayed bits and blurry pieces when she says, “Soon [the fog] would be at the near edge of the orchard, and then it was the time to go in and light the lamps. Come in, children, don't stay out in the night air. Lighting the lamps had been beautiful. The little children huddled up to her and breathed like little calves waiting at the bars in the twilight.”

My kids are too old to huddle like calves in the twilight, but reading those lines made me remember when they did. Nights of the three of us in a pile on the couch watching a movie together and road trips with crayons and stickers on notepads and little voices in the backseat as I drove us on long stretches of straight highway to the blue waters of the gulf. We are in a different moment now. They don’t huddle like calves but instead run awkwardly like foals. They play their music loudly from behind a closed bedroom door, and I’m driving driving driving all the time. Not the ease of a long highway on a road trip but the stop-start of suburban red lights and rehearsal schedules and in and out with the slamming of car doors as our soundtrack and my promise to pick them up in two hours. It is not my favorite season, but will I miss this one day? Or the better question to ask myself - what details of my life feel mundane now, but I will miss them eventually? The beauty and tragedy of life is perhaps that we can never answer that question in the moment, but only in retrospect.

I finished Ariel Lawhon’s The Frozen River a few days ago, a book I’d heard so much about and added to my Audible queue to keep me company in my constant mom taxi routes. It had me in its grip from beginning to end, a Colonial American midwife in the throes of a murder mystery with subplots that drove the characters to surprising endings. The audiobook narrator felt warm and true, and I felt sad to near the ending. There is a moment when the main character is on route from one birth to another with a stop at home in between, and she says,

“This is the trouble faced by any woman who sets pen to paper in a busy household. I am never guaranteed the certainty of quiet, much less a solid length of time to chase my thoughts and bind them together. That is the luxury of men with libraries, butlers, and wives. Mothers find a different way to get their work done. Ha! There it is. A glimmer. I grab hold of the tail end of a thought as it skitters by, then chase it so that it won’t evaporate.”

I loved those lines so much I noted the time stamp as I was listening so that I could return to it to listen again and write it down, but sure enough when I looked online, I found that others who have read the book noted that passage as well. It made me think about all of us doing the work of mothering and trying to write or create in the corners of our overflowing lives. At least I’m in good company here with all of the other women changing diapers or chasing kids on playgrounds or folding laundry or driving teenagers around. There is so much we could create and do if we weren’t doing this. But we are doing this, so we work with it. Motherhood itself is an act of creation, and somehow we find a different way to get the work done. I have not had many complete thoughts at all lately, and I miss them. I’m trying to at least grab the tail end as it skitters by, but even that is hard. I’ve been hard on myself about that lately, too. Writing goals I haven’t met are haunting me.

But when can I get it done? The hard truth we don’t want to admit to ourselves sometimes is that you cannot do all the things you want to do, or at least you cannot do them all in the same season of your life. This last few months has not been a season of my own dreams at all. They are not even in the backseat lately but thrown in the trunk and locked away where I cannot hear them as I race from task to task. But one day that will change. Right now, my mind is so scattered that even the glimmers cannot take root, and my creative life is suffering for it. My springtime resolution is to give the glimmers just a little more breathing room before my brain moves into productivity mode and the million “urgent” things on my list in any given hour. That does not mean that I can suddenly perfect the creative tasks waiting for me, but it means I can dabble enough for creativity to do its work on me, to inspire me and whisper to me in a voice that makes me remember who I am and what I want, which is the whole point anyhow.

Cherry blossoms falling like snow petals are my reminder what we live our years in seasons and rhythms. Winter’s chill opens to windy spring afternoons and eventually to summer tomatoes, and the first few mornings of a fall chill feel as welcome to me as the first sunny afternoons of spring because they both assure us of the same thing— life is moving forward, cycles continue, change is coming. This is a hard season. But this is me reminding myself that this season I am in is only a season. There is more ahead of me, and I don’t want to be Granny Weatherall in the years ahead, looking back to my own hours with my children in these moments and tragically only seeing the beauty in retrospect.

I had only my daughter on Sunday afternoon without my son, so I suggested to her that we take a drive to a local garden with over 250 acres of landscaped paths and flowers. It has ponds and waterlilies and 50 acres of daffodils. Tulips were wide open and azaleas beginning to bloom, and we caught the last days of cherry blossoms overlapping with daffodil blooms and spring flowers. A few days after my roadside observations of blowing petals, I saw the same there as well. Early spring’s remnants beginning to fall and adorn everything nearby with polka dots.

I was afraid my daughter might be bored, but she wasn’t. We meandered over stone bridges and around ponds with winding paths through yellow daffodils and bright tulips. They’ll be gone soon and make way for other blooms because that’s the story of a year and its passing seasons. I am frayed at the edges lately, rushing from one thing to another, barely juggling all the tasks handed to me from all directions and always afraid I will drop the ball on something important. But these daily challenges are also fleeting, a fact I am thankful for because I walk so close to the edge of complete burnout everyday, and I cannot imagine living this life indefinitely. This season will have an end, and I will get my complete thoughts back. Until then, I can chase the tail of these glimmers and hope they don’t evaporate before I catch them.

As we walked paths yesterday in the gardens and watched rain droplets fall on a still pond with tulips bouncing in the breeze, I remembered that beauty for beauty’s sake is enough to wake you up. It is not frivolous; it’s the whole point. Spring summons us to to see that and reminds us that there is some chord in us that can only be played when we pause to see the simple beauty in front of us. In the frantic pace of my daily life, it’s music I haven’t heard it in a long time, but I’m ready to play it again.

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