It has been many years since I visited the Midwest in the springtime.  This year, as always, there were blooms spilling over the walkways and weighing down tree boughs everyplace we stopped.  The grass was insanely green. You forget how green green can be.  You also forget that children raised in totally different region have completely different ideas of what spring looks like.  

I read an essay in a magazine the other day where the author was sharing the story of going back to her childhood town with her children.  She was met by riotous flowering shrubs and heavily perfumed air. She was overcome with memories prompted by the surroundings, memories which her children did not share having lived in a very different place all their lives. They did not share the same nature cues, she said. 

I have thought about that a great deal.  For all my growing up years spring came drizzling in with cool, damp days and muddy footprints at the door.   The lawn was spongey, filled to capacity and then some with the snow turned rain.  The sky was often gray but the ground was green – and red and purple and yellow, for there were the bulbs tucked into every corner.  I knew the names of them all – the crocus which came first, the hyacinths, tulips, and daffodils.  Finally the irises which marked the end of spring and beginning of summer in my mind.  

For my children spring bursts onto the scene unexpectedly. One day there is blowing snow and the next the sun beats down and coats are shed.  It all happens with little warning.   The grass turns from deep gold to a pale green seemingly overnight.  They sky is blue. The last of the tumbleweeds blow from the fencelines.  In the fields that line the roadsides, calves appear by their mother's sides.  The pronghorn are on the move.  The meadow larks take up their nests again in the few large trees out front. They chatter and swoop low when we walk underneath to the mailbox. The ground squirrels dart across the road, tempting fate. This is springtime in the West, which they know so well.  These are the rhythms buried deep into their psyche's and what will come back to them in sudden snatches when they are grown. 

So the sometimes soggy, always exuberant, Midwest springtime meant something different to them than it did to us no doubt. They thought it was beautiful, if a little foreign.  It did not trigger any long forgotten memories for them however. Lovely as it was, it was not home for them.  I enjoyed sharing it with them but it was wonderful coming home again and seeing them slip eagerly into their routine once more. Be it ever so humble… : ) 

Tess, once again proving that the ninth child does not in fact get photographed less than first child lol!