Mom's Spring

This is a piece I found recently that Mom probably wrote for her church writing group, in 2003 or 2004, at the age of 82.

Spring

The Spring of the  year is so joyous!  Spring in Washington is lovely, but the greenness has been there all winter, so it is not as dramatic as spring in my home state of Wisconsin.  There, one day it was winter, then the next day it was spring!  I remember how it felt to have spring come.  We children in grade school would get excited at the new season!  We would run home and demand to get our long winter underwear off!  The way my mother handled that, she simply snipped off the legs and arms of the despised garment.  She knew there would be cold days ahead and it would feel good to me on chilly days.

I remember suddenly the water running in the gutters beside the school.  Instead of snowbanks, the melted snow had it's way.

We girls excitedly got out our light weight clothes.  We left off the heavy woolen scarves and the clumsy rubber galoshes.  It felt so light to skip along the sidewalks in our leather shoes.  We left off our woolen caps, too.

The sun was shining, the sky was blue, and we were all looking forward to summer, to long, lazy days of swimming and hiking, exploring the woods nearby, roller skating on my brand new skates!

The first day of spring was unofficial, it was the first day in March that the sun came out and stayed out all day.  Sometimes we had a very late spring, but that made it all the sweeter when it finally arrived.  The things that I remember about spring as a child were robins chirping, beautiful purple, velvety violets, growing along the railroad tracks. Our Spirea bush, the prettiest and largest one in the town of Mukwonago, was glorious in its white plumage.  We always used it as a back drop for family photographs.

That's my Mom's remembrance of spring in Wisconsin, which she left when she was 12 years old.  70 years later the memories were still vivid and sweet.