The Cliché of Spring

            Spring is a cliché. Spring is such a cliché it makes me laugh, makes me shake my head in wonder that it happens every year the same, as though Nature has no tricks up her sleeve (the wily old woman; she has plenty): nothing new for this year, just the same old beginnings to tell us again that life is new.

            First the manzanita begins to bloom – tiny snow-pink bells ringing their silent peals between the evergreen leaves of the bushes: spring is coming, spring is coming, spring is coming; take heart, take heart, take heart. Winter and spring have been playing hide-and-go-seek for a month or so, but spring, inevitably, will win the game.

            Then the frogs begin to sing. Sing? Croak, crrrrreak, rivet, beroomp. Is that a song? Call that monotonous, unoiled, joyful croaking a chorus, maybe, a choral reading, the rhythmical combination of voices, but there is something undeniably unmusical about it. Far from the sweet strains of the violin, far from the dips and flights of the flute, far from the primitive evocation of the drums, this music can surely only be music to the ear of the frogs. But they revel in it, and so do I, so I’ll take their part and call it a song.

            And then, a few days ago, to complete the cliché, I saw lambs frolicking in the pasture – lambs, the tried and true symbol of spring, life recurring, life recycled.

            Clichés became clichés because they are true, because they hold in their almost hidden depths some essential truth of life, of human nature, of the quality of being and living. And so it is with spring. Summer, autumn, and winter are accepted as they come, one after the other, as the inevitable recurrence of the seasons, but somehow with spring the very cliché itself is that we are startled anew each year. The stillness of winter gradually passes into the activity which is the trademark of spring: bears begin to stir into life up on the ridge, sap rises in the trees, and my own blood runs with renewed force, my senses awaken to some primitive stirring of life in nature to which my being responds. My eyes look up. I stretch my muscles as I crawl out of hibernation and step outside the house into warm sunshine. I come to life. My heart expands with the warming weather like the swelling willow branches. My spirits rise with the new bird song, and I laugh at the frogs. I sing with them. I burst into life with the cliché of spring housecleaning. I wash the windows and beat the rugs. I bring out the shovel and the wheelbarrow. I put peas in the ground. Renew, renew, renew; the cycle has begun again.