there’s a special kind of sadness that seems to come with spring

alise versella

I USED TO FEEL THE CHANGING TO SPRING like sadness in my chest, like a pang of nostalgia for something I couldn’t explain.

The air smelled yellow-green, a crayon I used to hate for its waxy tread on paper, how it never drew smooth. I was a young Pappy drawing along on Saturday morning. I took the scraps of cardboard and created canvases. Legs pretzeled under my grandparent’s coffee table while Bob Ross pushed clouds into blue and the scratch, scratch of his palette knife was a chorus I couldn’t quit repeating. I want to be an artist when I grow up, I’d say.

I spent those spring mornings watching Captain Planet and Sailor Moon and I was a sailor scout running down the driveway into the sharp grass of the backyard. I can still smell the soft vinyl lounge chairs and feel the fibers of the crisscrossed fabrics wrapped around the backs of folding chairs. My grandpa snapping string beans, my aunt’s black-and-white striped tee. The smell of spring on Staten Island and the heat of the concrete, the slate I used to draw with chalk in. Hopscotch and Mother May I, Simon Says and snow cones, the smell of blacktop and rubber swings. Cigarettes and exhaust.

Maybe once I moved here spring reminded me of loss. Of not fitting in, of self-consciousness.

I raced my neighbors to the bus stop, and I played Skip It in the street and one day I collided with my sister—buck teeth to top lip. I am forever wounding her. Forever guilty of being the older sister who failed. She said I almost let her drown in the brown of the lake and I don’t remember it. Memories faulty and altered by who lived it.

Spring blossoms and we stagnate, girls whose buds were lobbed off by the deer that trampled through the woods towards the streetlights of dusk. They crowd on the corner, shadowed. They cross the back roads and stare as if to say, what are you still doing here?

One year a lone coyote trailed the porches of our street up and down for weeks. Ratty tailed and then he left. A ghost like old neighbors who moved away, like old arguments echoing in the hallway, like images of little girls in matching overalls and struggling to make wishes out of weeds.

What if we had taken root elsewhere? But maybe a root-bound thing is the wrong analogy. Unable to uproot and flee without feeling guilty, the trunks of us twisted and not getting oxygen. I sat under the maple tree and concocted potions. Twirled the helicop-ter leaves and opened each pod to grab their seeds. They had potential, it’s the worst thing to have. Years later the maple tree and the forsythia—with its yellow petals, would be torn out. I watched the bark turn to wood chips and dust the lawn. So much of us is strewn across the lawn, the street and the lakes and each spring maybe I smell pieces of our old selves and I miss them, who we were and maybe who we could’ve become

Back then.

Spring is rebirth but painful. It takes hard work: tilling and mulching, turning over.

It never feels like you’re getting anywhere.

But then the wind picks up—lifts our hair, something stirs in my chest and maybe this year it isn’t grief for some missed thing but softer, hope that one day we will leave.

All this work for some beautiful harvest before the world holds its breath again.

One day you and I will take in lungfuls of air without them rat-tling, without wincing against the next worst thing. We will exhale the eggshells we walk on and use them for composting. Something better will grow under our feet. Others will watch us and chase after our dandelion seeds floating on that shining spring breeze, the world all new and awaking from its slumbering.