Sunday, March 18, 2012

My favorite season



There must be something in the air besides spring time.  Because this three-year-old essay by Kelly Corrigan keeps popping into my head, and it has nothing to do with the weather.

But I am realizing it has a lot to do with seasons.

The essay is about female friendships, and how large they loom in a life.  But it is also about middle age, which as much as my husband denies it, is the season we are entering.  Suddenly all the anecdotes that sounded good a few years ago are actually part of my ecosystem - the bake sales, the charities, the home improvements, work outs, and laugh lines.  But with them comes the Other List:  divorces, diagnoses, and most unbearably, death.  As the plots of our lives take unexpected turns, I find there's nothing quite like adversity to bring friendships to full bloom.    I am aware of this friendship so much now as I give it and receive it.  How funny that at a time in our lives when we are so immersed in family and our own dramas, I feel so connected to friends.

I have always loved the energy created when seasons shift - and the days, the wardrobe, the diet -  all transform into something at once new and completely familiar.  And this, Winter into Spring, is my favorite, despite the fact that March and April are restless torture for me, until Spring itself explodes in the month of May.

If life is lived through seasons - middle age is our Autumn.  How lovely that suddenly it's feeling like Spring.  Restless torture as we anticipate it - glorious, in it's own way, when it gets here.








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