Column: The whiff of promise brought by spring

I don't know if it was the return of sunshine and slowly warming temperatures last week or what, but everybody is getting a little stir crazy. Sure, maybe it's the pandemic we have all been living through for the last year combined with loads of people getting vaccinated and feeling free to move about the cabin again. But this spring is surely not like any in recent memory. Springtime always brings with it the whiff of promise, carried in on the smell of new daffodils and sun-warmed dirt, doesn't it? I wonder sometimes if it is just bred into us. Maybe it's from years of setting our internal clocks to school calendars that set us free come June. Remember those days? Teachers would slow down on the homework, we'd haul home our stacks of old art projects and forgotten locker clothes, dumping the petrified lunches from the bottom of our bags. Everybody would gear up for field day, sort of like a playground Olympics for bragging rights, topped off with the thing you'd look forward to all year — Popsicles or even, if you were lucky, those little individual cups of ice cream with the flat wooden spoons. The ones you got at home could never compare, could they? There's something about a Popsicle handed out in third grade, or purchased from the snack bar at a city pool, that just tastes so much sweeter. For us in the "frozen North," as my friends from away call it, it's no wonder we look forward to spring. Granted, they believe we live in a Hundred-Years-Winter kind of Narnia, which is how we Northern Ohioans see Maine. I don't know if it's my age that has tempered my memories but winter did seem much more intrusive when I was young. Maybe it's just that snowdrifts look bigger when you're only 4 feet tall and trudging to the bus stop. Either way, I'm dead certain schools didn't close down as quickly then. Remember the polar vortex a few winters back, when it was below zero for days on end here? Local districts closed for a week and all the old people (read: people my age) lost their minds. "These kids today are being raised too soft," I heard. I also heard that little trace of resentment in those sentiments; the "I didn't have it easy and you shouldn't, either." Personally, I think "these kids today" face challenges and hurdles the likes of which we never contemplated. If superintendents wanted to spare kids having to walk to school or to bus stops in dangerous temperatures, good. I'm glad any time a decision is made in favor of kids. Maybe that wasn't done enough "back in our day." That spring break from school was a delirious appetizer of summer, wasn't it? I'll never forget the year I won the Easter egg coloring contest at school just before break or the school librarian who bent the rules to let me pick out a full week's worth of books to hold me over. Small kindnesses, decades of gratitude. Raised in a Christian home, the message of Easter was always the promise of new things, the do-over for old regrets. Of course I was nearly grown before I figured that out but I guess it runs in my blood. My niece, whose father is a pastor, was once asked as a young child if she "knew what happened on Easter." "Of course I know. Jesus died," she said, while the adults in the room congratulated themselves on having such a prescient child who had learned from Sunday School. How young she was, and yet here she knew theology beyond the rabbit. "And why did he die?" they pressed. "Because the Easter Bunny killed him." We take our shots and we hug our people. We open our windows and we air out the house. We turn our eyes to the saints instead of the sinners and watch our days grow longer. It's not just the smell of crocus or chocolate bunnies this year that I'll remember. It's the hope. Contact Rini Jeffers at rinijeffers@gmail.com.