When Spring Came, I Was Home

Spring came, and nobody could stop it.

The winter seemed as if it would go on for all eternity, and then it died suddenly. Spring popped up just as quickly. The forever snow went away. Just days ago I saw crocuses and knew the winter was gone. Today, it was so warm that we had to turn on the window air conditioner to keep the downstairs from stifling.

That air conditioner was so loud that I almost didn’t hear the knock at the door.

It was Jimmy’s boy and the girl who loved Jesus, in shorts and tank tops as if it were July. Jimmy’s boy was grinning from ear to ear.

“Guess what?” asked Jimmy’s boy. “It’s my birthday!”

I’d remembered that it was his birthday. I’d been fretting about not having the cash to get him a present all week. But he wasn’t after a present. He was looking for someone to play with until his father got back with his cake.

“What kind of cake are you getting?” I asked, thinking he’d say “chocolate” or “vanilla.”

“Sponge Bob!” said Jimmy’s boy.

We went around the back, where I produced two little packets of pea seeds.

“It’s time to plant the spring garden. Birthday boy gets the bigger pack!”

The children were thrilled to plant the spring garden. I poked holes in the soil, lecturing about how delicious the peas would be and how we could eat the pods without cooking them. They took turns putting a pea in each hole: first Jimmy’s boy placed a sugar snap pea, then the girl placed an Amish snap pea, again and again in two rows for me to trellis as they grew. We watered them gently. Then I turned over the soil in a new place, and handed them each a packet of lettuce seeds.

I lectured as I helped them along. “This is where we’ll have peas, lettuce, onions, and of course all these strawberries. See the leaves? Everything you’re stepping on will be a strawberry plant! Oh look, a worm!”

“Aw!” said the girl– thrilled, rather than disgusted as I’d expected.

“Put him over in the compost so he won’t dry out!”

She cupped the creature in her hand, almost the same gesture as receiving Holy Communion, and walked reverently to the compost heap as if she was in a procession.

I started pointing out the sights in the garden. “Now over by the rose bush we’ll plant herbs, we’ll plant blackberries here in the planter where they can’t creep all over the yard. Over in the summer garden we’ll have corn, beans, squash, and lots of tomatoes. And potatoes in the buckets, of course! I’ve got a plan to plant potatoes, better than last year.”

A red robin hopped onto the yard  just then, but the little girl shrieked and chased him away so he wouldn’t eat the worm. And then, of course, right on queue, came the neighborhood cat the children call Sparkles. I’ve started calling him Buster. If the cat with the gray mustache who comes to the front porch for lunch every afternoon is named Charlie Chaplin, then his sibling ought to be named Buster Keaton. Buster leaped silently back and forth from the spring garden to the summer garden, weaving through the wire fencing I’d already started to put up, rolling over so that I’d pet his white belly. He batted at my hands with no claw at all– all play, no malice, a tame creature through and through.

Adrienne came out to help finish building that wire fence. The little children began climbing up and down the porch, playing in the warm spring afternoon air.

It felt like paradise.

It felt as if I’d lost every single vestige of the life I had when I came out here to Steubenville nearly nineteen years ago, and it had hurt to lose it, and losing it wasn’t fair. But I’d gotten back a life I like, a life that makes me happy. At age forty and a half, barren, broke, traumatized but recovering, I was happy. In a tumbledown rental house in a poor neighborhood in a miserable corner of Northern Appalachia, I was at home.

I like it here.

It’s going to be all right.