The other evening I was sitting on our deck with the dogs, just listening to the peepers in the marsh across the way. It was great to slow down and gaze down the hill, feeling the warm evening breeze and appreciating the absence of bugs. Songbirds just coming back from their winter migrations trilled in trees laced with still-clenched buds and new leaves.

I started thinking how spring used to be a season that I shied away from … seeing it as just too “femmy,” as I recall. Those damn Easter dresses and Easter bonnets … all that fuss (when I just wanted to get outside and play whiffle ball as the days lengthened)!

Now, especially after a good New Hampshire winter like the one we just had, I come to see spring as at heart not the fancy femmy filigreed frippery that I disdained as a scruffy young tomboy … but a brave affirmation. Very brave. It’s all about new life boiling and churning and shooting through half frozen earth toward the wan light and thin warmth of a burgeoning season.

Blossoms that I used to think of as frippery are not frippery at all. Fragile, yes … frippery, no! They’re the very tenderest of things, pushing themselves slowly, quietly, relentlessly through frost and mud.  Undaunted, each year these small shoots break through the veil that separates nascence and being. Here they come … the tenderest of things, moving through the dark and cold to a new season.  Here they come … vulnerability and power twinned again, as they are each and every spring.

So I watch and listen, and am reminded of where my power lies, too!