February Fooled the Forsythia*

The forsythia are blooming.

I had never heard of forsythia, that I remember, until I moved to New England. In fact, I had never experienced a spring, either, because I grew up in a place of perpetual summer, of hot and hotter. New England's autumns garnered all of the publicity, so I fully anticipated the blaze of October. Dreary winters shocked me with their length and almost killed me. Spring, however, came as a surprise, softly dusting the trees with green, punctuated by explosions of pink and yellow.

The forsythia came first. Like fireworks, their branches fanned up and out, finally arcing down toward whatever dismal patch of ground they sat on. Vibrant yellow that demanded your attention.

That first spring, and the second, followed a soul-crushing winter of growing discontent. The weather weighed upon even happy people. For an unmedicated, poverty-stricken depressive, winter was hell. In fact, I remembered that, in Dante's Inferno (which resonated that second winter), he had made his Hell icy cold. Now, I knew why.

Spring had always meant dread in the land of unrelenting summer. Spring covered the world in a thick layer of green pollen that left me curled up on the sofa in the dark for days on end as I tried to outlive one migraine after another. Spring also meant the advance of the neverending heat.

In New England, spring suddenly seemed feminine and maternal in a way that I had never experienced, even from my own mother (definitly not from my own mother, whose method of maternal more resembled a tornado). Spring promised releif, warmth, and a possible break from the humiliations of my winter. Spring promised color.

The fosythia came first. Driving north from New Bedford to Boston, reciting my lines from A Midsummer Night's Dream, I passed explosions of yellow in the neutral spaces. Life forces of joy leaping up from the ground; and I felt, for a moment, the same joy.

I focus on the forsythia in my memory of that time to make it large enough to blot out its context. When I imagine that time, I now see a giant bloom of forsythia against endless empty black.

*This post has nothing to do with February or Nabakov, but I do love that line.