In the mountains where I spend my childhood, spring is never warm. The muddy soil is dotted with snow patches, and icicles cling to gutters late into May. It is like glitter on the pavement when they finally fall to the ground, tiny shards of winter shattering in puddles. The afternoon sun licks them up as if they were never there, as if winter hadn’t covered our town or home.
A few streets over in a brown a-frame set back behind the trees lives my friend Natalie, and when the weather finally warms, we 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. The occasional truck passes and splashes our bodies with cold air and goose pimples. We hug the white line and each other for safety and warmth—a reminder we are alive. Also that winter is hardly behind us.
You have 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 clean their tackle boxes, and neighborhood boys perform bike tricks on dusty mounds. The lake feels so small and bland compared to what I’ve envisioned summers should feel like for teenage girls, but Natalie and I do our best to make it feel desirable, lathering in baby oil and lying like corpses on oversized beach towels at the end of the dock. I so desperately want 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 lie still long enough, I can convince myself that the sun feels warm. I can dip my fingers in the water and pretend I am touching the Pacific.
*
A decade later: A “real summer” is the reason I choose a college in Los Angeles. I hate the slow crawl of spring in the mountains, how it always feels lackluster and like a tease or an unfulfilled promise.
My body longs for the scorching sun, my limbs beg to be drenched in sweat and nakedness. After years spent living in the mountains—first Tahoe, then Colorado—I am ready for a harsh contrast:
desert heat to make me feel awake, alive, uncomfortable even.
*
Two decades later: I am thirty-three when I finally fall in love with spring, though it looks different in the desert than in the mountains. The sky is soft and fragrant, traced by light breezes and purple Jacaranda petals blowing in the wind. Sometimes, the rains come, and a cold I have forgetten wraps my body in memories. A promise perhaps that I will return, one day, to my roots.
Which I do, for weeks at a time. I drive to the mountains and sit on the banks of the river, lie back on wet sand and feel warmth that isn’t artificial, that isn’t a humming heater in my apartment. I am still in jeans, still with a sweater close by for when the shade and shadows creep in. I chase the magical sliver of light around the forest and let it land on my shoulders, wipe the itch in my eye, endure the shock of pollen to my immune system and pay my dues in exchange for sun and nature.
Other things I do in spring:
Leave the book untouched on my nightstand, the last page dog-eared weeks ago. The hours spent sleeping and devouring novels depart with winter. I trade reading for writing, silence for music, thick novels for bite-sized stories that sting my ears, stay with me, and make me want to create like a crazed woman, to be a better writer.
Shed my socks and feel the cold kitchen floors beneath me. Open the windows so I can notice how the breeze changes day by day, one degree at a time.
Run three miles outside to escape my thoughts and feelings. Pay for it later with hips that ache and knees that buckle with every step.
Chill the wine. Add asparagus to the pasta. Swap out the linen sheets for crisp cotton. Notice a new wrinkle.
*
Perhaps the ultimate paradox: a reminder that so much life is lived in the in-between.
Spring is subtlety at its finest. The slow dances of soft winds and tiny movements, sprouts inching their way to the surface, poking through, desperate for the sun’s touch, the sweaters worn with shorts, the icy sea waves on sun-stained sand, the ice cream melting between fingers, turning knuckles blue and numb.
Spring is a little bit of everything, which perhaps is why it always perplexed me in my youth and impatience. Even now, in my thirties, 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.
Yet spring is when growth happens, and I don’t want to miss that. I want to catch a tiny ray on my face and notice a new freckle. A reminder that the sun will come, the scorching days so blatantly and brashly summer. Soon, very soon.
**Parts of this post were originally published in April 2023
Read: I finally got my hands on a copy of Here After and I was up all night reading. It feels strange to say I “love” this book because it’s so tragic and gutting. Yet, I do. The writing is gorgeous. The sparseness of each page keeps me holding my breath. I really don’t have the words to do it justice. Just please, please, please read it.
Additionally, I’m really excited to share that a subscriber has just published her second book!
writes novels starring women of color in the workplace and her second novel, Valley Verified, was released this year. 💛Listen: I’ve been listening to so much music lately & Myles Smith has been one of my favorite artists of the year.
You literally transported me back to childhood. It's wild how vivid your writing is.
Your writing is so beautiful. I love the design of your site. Reading your words and then scrolling to music and book recommendations is brillinat. Thank you so much!
Kara