Spring is Divine

I absolutely fell in love with Spring when I was living in Marquette, Michigan. There the ground disappears beneath feet of snow, staring in late October. You start seeing glances of dirt or brown grass reappearing in late April. In other words, the winters were very, very long.

I can remember so clearly how spring would then burst onto the scene the first week of May. The piles of brown snow would melt rapidly and tulips and daffodils would be sprouting. The bountiful apple trees would blossom and our sheep would lamb. There is nothing more glorious than watching little lambs trying out their new legs to leaps and bounds here and there.

Here is the northwest, we are not buried beneath feet of snow for months, but beneath thick ocean clouds. That's not a bad thing as I like the melancholy of a gloomy day. and the sound of drizzle on our metal roof.

But I'm still a lover of spring. Here, spring comes earlier but no less glorious. Our cloudy skies abruptly give way to skies of total blue. Each year they seem a deeper blue than the year before.

In our valley we are surrounded by snow-capped mountains in almost a 360 degree circumference. The sea around our island, mimicking the sky above goes from a foamy gray to a brilliant blue. Now the sea is dotted with white triangles of sails.

Between the jagged, iced peaks the North Cascades, lies some of the flattest land I've ever seen. The contrast is profound. Our number one crop in this richly agriculture basin are flowers. The early Dutch settlers brought in tulips and daffodils. It is surreal to walk these fields that are so deeply purple, or red or yellow that it makes you dizzy. I would love to walk them with Van Gogh and then sit in silence as he worked his impressionistic magic on the canvas.

Spring does bring a feeling of hope eternal. Of God really being there and a future that is bright in this life and in the near more perfect earth. The worries of the winter, the pessimism all seem to melt away like that nasty brown snow of Marquette.

All this was to lead up to a poem about spring by Frost.

A Prayer in Spring

Robert Frost (1915)

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day; And give us not to think so far away As the uncertain harvest; keep us here All simply in the springing of the year. Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white, Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night; And make us happy in the happy bees, The swarm dilating round the perfect trees. And make us happy in the darting bird That suddenly above the bees is heard, The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill, And off a blossom in mid air stands still. For this is love and nothing else is love, The which it is reserved for God above To sanctify to what far ends He will, But which it only needs that we fulfil