Still Searching, Still Spring

Dispatch from the Gunnison Valley 5.14.22

---

Last year I sent a dispatch about searching for Spring along the Front Range of Colorado.

That was March in Denver when things were warm and pushing forth and spring felt like the known season that I was birthed from, but this year is different.

I now live at nearly 8,000 feet elevation and the climate here is a new friend I’m timidly getting to know. It’s not that I don’t want to understand the nuances of life in the sagebrush steppe, but instead, I’ve been struggling to understand the pace that is offered to me.

A few weeks ago I lamented to a friend about the delayed spring I was experiencing. I wrote to her,

“This is the first spring I've lived in such high elevation and I feel myself YEARNING for the big burst of spring. But that's not how it works up here. Everything is tedious, quiet, subtle, and nearly underground. Aspens don't create blooming flowers like dogwood or a cherry blossom does, instead, they create little fuzzy catkins that look like caterpillars. I don’t see any forsythia or lilacs, and if there are tulips and daffodils they've yet to come out of the ground. I've been looking for all of these monumental spring signs, but I've been looking for the wrong thing. The other night Eli and I took a walk along a farm path that runs tandem to the river. We saw baby cows and sheep, we heard and sang with robins and red-winged blackbirds, and we sat at the river— now fully defrosted from winter— and dreamt of our summer adventures floating and laughing down the same current. I was reminded that life is different here, but that I chose it and there is nowhere else I want to be right now.”

Three weeks later and I am here–now– surrounded by verdant waxy leaves hardly the size of coins. Nearly every aspen catkin has turned into a bouquet of fresh leaves and they are greener and sweeter than I could have dreamed. The apple trees lining Main street are in their hybrid state of buds and blooms and the entire town is fragrant in honey pollen and I am suddenly stumbling drunk on spring. There are bunnies plump with fur, and deer surveying the young gardens; neighbors and dogs– even nocturnal cats– are out on the streets deep into the twilight. We are waking up with the birds and emerging new into this hybrid season that is quickly spring and nearly summer.

I feel like I’ve been waiting for this the whole time. That this is what spring is “supposed” to be, but this week is revealing to me how much spring is not about arrival and is so much more about becoming. Three weeks felt like a long time to my patience, but what is three weeks to a tree? To a shrub? To a bulb, hungry in the soil waking up for the first time in months and devouring all the nutrients that it’s offered? What is three weeks to the great turning wheel that knows not time as linear but as a moving current that pulls us all along?

A week from yesterday, I retrieved my parents from the airport after instructing them to bring beanies and fleeces and to be prepared for mornings in the 20s. There were buds plump, but no indication of bursts, and I was worried that this early spring season would be too cold for my family coming from a temperate climate. And miraculously within seven days, we watched the world change. Truly, overnight branches woke from their winter slumber and leaves began to appear. The ornamental cherry shrub in our driveway turned from bare branches to bouquets of bubble gum and fuschia in a matter of hours. I text my botanist roommate and ask her who is this gorgeous friend? She knows, instantly. And I too want to know. I want to be in relationship with these hardy plants that show no threat to the elongated cold or to the harsh vernal winds. I try to kiss every leaf and every bloom that’s eye-level and I whisper to every tree how grateful I am that they are here.

We watched it all turn over, my parents, my partner, and his; we caught glimpses of birth like a time-lapse that suspends frames into seconds. Even ardently watching it unfurl I can’t pinpoint when it happened, because it is happening. It’s turning spring while it’s turning summer and as summer swells it too turns into fall. Life at elevation can be harsh at times, but can also provide the gentlest reminders.

Tonight everything hums along to the great tune of Spring. Hues of chartreuse, lime, sage, olive, moss, forest, and fern. Honeybees, ladybugs, rabbits, deer, and calves resting in nearby pastures. The redwing blackbirds, the robins, the mourning doves, the geese happily feeding on newborn grass. This is spring in Gunnison and I am so glad that I am here.

Towards the Light we Go–