My Last Spring in New England

A little bit of green in the rainy season

Gosh I have lived my whole life up here, really. While I was born in cowboy country Texas, I didn’t stay there long. I was raised in New England. Went to school in Saratoga, NY. Then came back to New England proper soon after to stay. Heck, until recently I lived in a house that was about a mile away from the one I was raised in.

For those of you who might have caught me talking a little about this on Twitter, my life has taken some unexpected, but welcome, turns over the last six months. Turns that have me, for the first time ever, looking to move away from the region I have spent my whole life inhabiting. While I’m not going far enough to change my scenery entirely, I have been considering moving a few climate zones warmer than what I have been used to my whole life.

So I am trying to enjoy this maybe last springtime in Massachusetts. The cold, the wind, the sudden sunny days followed by snow. And the way one day you wake up and all the trees have taken on little hints of green and red.

I don’t have anything special to talk about today, just that it is the end of March and soon enough we’ll barrel into another summer and then another autumn, and then another winter before we do it all again. But for me, this next time it might be a little different. A different spring, a different summer, a different autumn, a different winter.

And that’s really all there is to it: Learning what will and will not grow all over again. Finding that, ultimately, every plant needs the same things. Sunlight, water, to be read Rilke even though I know it doesn’t actually do anything but make me feel like art can do something.

In any case, this is a saccharine, personal post. There will be more poetry come Monday, this time something I found on my hard drive that I wrote a long time ago, in Saratoga, NY, when I was much younger, much stupider, much drunker, but otherwise eerily the same. And then later next week should see the first piece I have been writing that will hopefully begin to make good on the promise of this space.

In the meantime, enjoy whatever season you’re moving through, and I hope that whatever you are growing, grows. If you feel so inclined, go ahead and tell me about it in the comments. I’m sure some of you are growing some poems or stories or new cookie recipes that are actually just the good ol’ one repackaged again.