SPRING-O!

Plus: Has anyone ever been to the circus, actually?

A Note for You, If You’re Having A Bad Day

My Dear Friend,

Last week, the northern hemisphere slid through the spring equinox. In Chicago, there was a wintry storm. My husband and daughter were out of town without me for the first time in T’s life, which I’d been dreading, but when the equinox came and I woke up alone in bed and looked out my window to see daffodils wearing crowns of snow, I wondered if I would’ve had the wherewithal to notice any of spring’s terrific contradictions in the presence of my human family.

Wherever you are on the planet, the season is changing — some would say aggressively. (Is it rude for so much to happen at once?) I take eight weeks off a year (not all at once!), to celebrate different druidic-adjacent seasonal changes (it is absolutely as tie-dye-banana-bread-y as it sounds, no apologies), and last week was the week to celebrate flowers. Without anyone in town to say, “That sounds like a lot of work, let’s just go to the playground a block away,” I went the orchid show at The Botanical Gardens. On a Friday at noon, the show brimmed with attendees, median age 78, who mostly all had the same thing to say: orchids are erotic.

They said this in different ways; I wandered around just inside earshot of as many chit-chatting tour groups as I could, and smiled to myself as I heard:

• “My my, it’s quite… feminine, isn’t it?”

• “I’ve never noticed how explicit these flowers are.”

• “They’re all so sensual.”

• “These flora are entirely prurient. They’re practically lubricious.” (This particular person was the literal worst and his companion looked simultaneously panicked and exhausted.)

Etcetera, etcetera. It’s not like I wasn’t thinking exactly the same thing: orchids are cascades of colorful Georgia O’Keeffe-y vaginas, and nothing makes that clearer than an orchid show. Still, I enjoyed being able to hear the same conversation repeatedly, in so many different voices. It must happen all day every day. I wonder if the flower docents (is that what they’re called?) laugh about it in the break room.

My own orchid plant in my own home isn’t doing so well, ever since I knocked her over while gesticulating during a phone call with my sister. I’ve had my orchid (Samantha! I just named her that! I instantly regret it, because it seems like she is dying, but I should have done this sooner) for seven years, since the first class I taught at SAIC. Two students bought the orchid for me at a Target. I knew I’d kill it; who doesn’t kill an orchid? But the leaves are still green, and the complicated root system seems to be doing its job. (This is mysterious; who can be sure?) Keeping this orchid alive is one of the only things that has made me believe I am an actual adult — along with having matching plates, and knowing how to level a shelf.

This is from this old article.

The other thing — the more definite thing — that makes me feel like an adult is that the years have started moving so fast. My mom told me that this effect never reverses itself, and every year is always faster than the one before it. Oliver Burkeman writes about this in Four Thousand Weeks:

Philosophers from ancient Greece to the present day have taken the brevity of life to be the defining problem of human existence: we’ve been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action. “This space that has been granted to us rushes by so speedily and so swiftly that all save a very few find life at an end just when they are getting ready to live,” lamented Seneca, the Roman philosopher, in a letter known today under the title On the Shortness of Life.

There is only one way to adequately deal with this problem: you must live the life you want to live now. This is easier said than done: I have a secret page in my notebook where I harbor a to-do list so long it might as well be the population of a city. I am philosophically opposed to this kind of list, but there it is. It would be my sole ruler, if it weren’t for my incredible will to occasionally be awake to my life.

So here’s my small suggestion for these days when life is bursting forth at warp speed: SPRING-O. (It’s pronounced like BINGO, not like “Spring! Oh!”). If you’re in the Southern Hemisphere, I see no reason why you couldn’t play FALL-O — fall is a similarly transitional season, where you can watch the stage manager break down the set, piece by piece.

This is last year’s SRING-O. I can’t believe I haven’t taken a picture of this year’s board; I look at it obsessively! But you get it: there’s a bunch of different spring awakenings, each gets a box, each box gets a date when a person in the house (or elsewhere) spies it. Last year the first kinglet was seen 4/13; Luke saw a kinglet YESTERDAY, meaning that the kinglet was spotted a full two weeks-plus earlier this year. The first tulip opened on April 9 last year; we’ve had a few of those, too. Spring is, indeed, earlier this year than it was last year. We’ve had daffodils for weeks. The hyacinths are up.

It’s good to know this kind of thing, year to year; it keeps you in touch with what’s going on for the earth and reminds you that there’s a whole world underground over which you haven’t any individual control. More than that, taking long walks to notice, to pray, to be in communion, to slow, to care, to stop — this is what it is to be awake! Seasonal transitions are the best moments to be awake. You begin to feel small, and it becomes a feeling that you crave.

So get out your big paper and find a place in your house to put it up. We’ve never had any prizes associated with this, but it’s a triumph to have your name on the register. I copy the dates into an almanac Luke gave me a few years ago. On the opening page of the “spring” section, Luke has written, “2/9/2023: Sophie saw the first flower of the year. It was a snowdrop.”

I hope you find something that makes you feel curious amidst all the change. (If you don’t know the names of the plants, download an app to help you! Seek is a good free one.) I hope your smallness brings you some peace, sometimes. Good luck out there, bravely facing all that breaks your heart.

Love,
Sophie

Housekeeping:

I’d love to push our paid subscriber count over 400. It seems impossible. So… what about if there was a sale and the sale was for 40 percent off!? Is that just bad business? I agree, it’s not very good business. Oh well! (Paid subscriptions come with a lot of perks, including extra links and suggestions on stuff I like, which is my most popular content.) (Also, it makes a big difference in my life! Thank you for making a difference in my life, and helping me continue to do this.)

Here’s the link to get 40 percent off!

Loose Thoughts:

• There are uncharacteristically twenty things in my email Inbox right now. That may not seem like a lot to you, but I generally try to keep an Inbox Under Five rule in place, for my own wellbeing. Things have piled up. I want to tell you I’ve been busy, but in fact, I haven’t really been that busy. I spent my days alone in my house cleaning it. I didn’t look at my computer at all. I cleaned and listened to things, and sometimes didn’t listen to things. I washed surfaces that have maybe never been washed. I de-gunked the toaster. I could have been responding to emails, but I just wasn’t. And I feel OK about this, except that some of them are from some of you, and I feel bad to have neglected you. I want you to know: I got your email. I will write you back! Thank you for being patient with me.

• In my office in The Loop, there’s sometimes a sort of circus-type of music that you can hear if you sit near the windows. I don’t know from where it comes, but somewhere down there, it’s blasting. I don’t know if I’ve ever been to a circus, or if my memories of the circus are informed by having so many stories set in circuses, and being so familiar with the stories. I really feel like I’ve been to one, but I don’t have a specific memory. Have you?

• In New Orleans, there was always unexpected music gushing all around. I loved sitting in my damp study trying to figure out if my neighbor was paying the accordion or if there was an accordion in some strange small parade wobbling through the neighborhood.

• “Gushing” was a fun word. Once, on a train, I sat for such a long time trying to describe what the windows in the train looked like. I luxuriated in the amount of time I had to come up with this word. The word I chose was “slablike.” It isn’t a real word. I stared at it on the page and felt I couldn’t be happier with a word. The way it looked pleased me.

• Did you ever do a cool TV-type of thing for spring break, like go to a beach? I never did, but I liked watching shows about cool-things-spring-breaks where girls made out on MTV.

• This is a question about Russian nesting dolls: how many times do you think a person dies while she is alive?