It’s not quite deep winter in the south anymore, things are coming forth and it’s undeniably warming. When I wake my son for school, cool morning light reaches in the window touching his face. The days slowly widen, though the sky still hangs close, a dull gray. A shrug of colorlessness.
I find myself looking to the ground, sodden and soaked from All This Rain We’ve Been Having…and here it is: green! My eyes starved for it, this color of life but really just a change.
The first greens are always either bulbs: daffodils mostly, their stems squeak when you pick them, weep a viscous water. They seem otherworldly and not quite here, even their scent is cloying and out of tune with the dirt dank smell of rain and gray days.
For me, I find the new growth and hopefulness in the the unwelcome. The wildflowers and weeds of this place names their own poems: hearts-a-bustin, pigweed, henbit deadnettle.
Their minute purple flowers remind me of soccer fields, of picking and not looking, while my brother Brandon yelling from sidelines: look up! pay attention! I was paying attention, just not to the ball hurling my way. To the game around me. To what everyone else is doing. Was doing.
So I’m writing about weeds but thinking of so many of my what-will-be’s. How this season lies dormant and blank, yet it stirs. The taproots, the worm work, the seeds warm and split and begin their unseen reaching. The days may widen and warm, but mostly its weeks of the same. Here I am, looking between for the unseen green. The what will be.