In search of heat

Photo by Feteme Fuentes on Unsplash

In the mountains where I spent my childhood, spring was never warm. The muddy soil was dotted with snow patches, and icicles clung to gutters late into May. It was like glitter on the pavement when they finally fell to the ground, the tiny shards of winter shattering in puddles. When the afternoon sun licked them up, it was as if they’d never been there, as if winter had never covered our town or home.

A few streets over in a brown a-frame set back behind the trees lived my friend Natalie, and when the weather finally warmed, we’d walk from her house to the lake in our bathing suits, our bare bodies skirting along the windy roads, towels and book bags slung over our shoulders. When the occasional car whooshed past, splashing our bodies with cold air and goose pimples, we’d hug the white line and each other for safety and warmth. It was a reminder we were alive. Also that winter was hardly behind us.

You had to walk past the cow field to get to the lake, then dart across the road and barrel down overgrown berms to the boat dock. Fishermen cleaned their tackle boxes, and neighborhood boys performed bike tricks on dusty mounds. The lake felt so small and bland compared to what I envisioned summers should feel like for teenage girls, but Natalie and I did our best to make do, lathering in baby oil and lying like corpses on oversized beach towels at the end of the docks. I so desperately wanted to be like my mother in her teenage years: tall and tan, splayed out on Orange County shores for the entire stretch of summer. If I laid still for long enough, I could convince myself that the sun felt warm. I could even dip my fingers in the water and convince myself I was bathing in the Pacific. Eventually, one of us would say I’m cold, then wrap up in the towel as the sun began to dip behind the trees.

*

A “real summer” was one of the main motivators when I moved to Los Angeles for college. I hated the slow crawl of spring in the mountains, how it always felt lackluster and like a tease or an unfulfilled promise. My body longed for the scorching sun, begged to be drenched in sweat and nakedness. After decades spent living in what felt like a winter globe marked only by slivers of warmth, I was ready for a harsh contrast, desert heat that made me feel awake, alive, uncomfortable even.

In my years of bouncing between mountain cities and desert climates, I’ve learned a few things about spring and even come to appreciate the season, though it looks much different living in Southern California. Spring down here is soft and fragrant, traced by light breezes and purple Jacaranda petals blowing in the wind—it’s hardly the icy mountain springs of my childhood.

Still, spring happens at a snail's pace. The frozen layer of earth must be chipped away, and it doesn’t happen quickly or easily. Instead, patience is required—the mountains taught me this much—and when we seek to be launched forward, we miss it, and we miss out. We miss spring.

Spring is its own timestamp with much to teach and offer. Perhaps the ultimate paradox, the season is a reminder that so much life is lived in the in-between—it’s easy to look back or to focus our attention forward. And we crave the significant events, the ones that feel bright and big and celebratory.

Spring is subtlety though, a slow dance of soft winds and tiny movements, sprouts inching their way to the surface, poking through, desperate for the sun’s touch. Spring is sweaters worn with shorts, icy sea waves on sun-stained sand, ice cream melting between fingers, turning knuckles blue and numb.

Spring is afternoon shadows and tiny leaves uncurling on their stems, morning frost and rushing rivers, open windows and cotton sheets and fallen lemons scattered on the lawn, ripe and ready for juicing.

Spring is a little bit of everything, which perhaps is why it always perplexed me in my youth and impatience. Even now, in my 30s, I feel the longing for a fast and forward motion to propel me out of the grey, out of the gloomy mornings that I can’t quite pinpoint as the beginning or end of winter.

The truth though is that the spring space is where life really happens, and I don’t want to miss that. This is the season where quiet growth shapes our days even when it feels insignificant or invisible. We catch a tiny ray on our face or notice a new freckle appearing on our skin and it’s a reminder that the sun will come, the scorching days so blatantly and brashly summer.

But right now, it’s spring. Soft and subtle. Slow, but slow on purpose.