This is going to grate on some of you like a verbal nails on a chalk board, but I actually love this time of year. Not the “it’s almost spring….the days are getting longer…time changes in a few weeks” time of year, but the brutal cold, grey skies, clouds, dampness, and barren landscapes time of year. I love this time of year because it transforms familiar, well known territory, into mystery and discovery. My family has been in Giles County for over ten generations and five of those generations currently reside on our family farm. I spent four years in High School working for the Giles County Highway Department on the paving crew, the patch truck, trash truck, and culvert clean out crew. The point I’m trying to stress is: I know this county like the back of my hand. There isn’t a road I haven’t driven down, and few I didn’t help pave. I can close my eyes and visualize most of this community from memory. But during this time of year, the places I’ve known, love, and recognized all my life, are transformed into something new, mysterious, and unknown. When all of the leaves have fallen to the ground and the trees are bare, and the underbrush and weeds have died down, you can see things you normally never get to see. The landscape that is normally hidden is laid bare and exposed, revealing all sorts of new discoveries. I see wells and springs I never notice. Houses, long abandoned, gradually being consumed by nature, and others that normally stay hidden by design. There are old cars and barren rocks and a hundred other sights I’ve never noticed because the window for viewing them is so brief. This time of year reminds me that life is like this. Beautiful, fascinating, important things get crowded out by full and busy lives and days. It’s in the loss of the things we love, even if just temporarily, for a season, that we learn to truly appreciate and treasure them. Harsh days enable us to better appreciate the mild ones because they strip away everything that covers up what is always with us, enabling us to see what has always been there.
That being said, I too am excited that the days are getting longer and the time is about to change because this season is tough to endure for too long, but tough is not a bad thing. Our bodies deteriorate in catastrophic ways when they aren’t made to do tough things (exercise, work, strenuous activities, getting up and down out of the floor playing with grandchildren). If we don’t make our bodies do difficult things then everything our body tries to do will become difficult — things like sitting up, standing up, walking, climbing stairs, getting up and down out of the floor playing with grandchildren.
Speaking of grandchildren, we’ve started a practice with Rougaroux when he tells us something is hard or he can’t do it. We fight all grandparently instincts to the contrary and refuse to help, at least for a moment. Instead of helping we encourage him that he can do it and to try again. It started one night when he was trying to climb up on our bed to get to some toys, but it’s just a little too high for his little legs. We encouraged him to try all sorts of techniques and attempts — running and jumping, grabbing onto the sheets and pulling — and after a few tries he was able to struggle his way onto the bed and immediately exploded with joy and shouting “I did it!” Of course Honey and I joined in the celebration and made him repeat after me, “I can do hard things.” Since that night we’ve repeated that phrase a half dozen times in all sorts of scenarios. I don’t know if I’m trying to teach him or remind myself.
The same is true of our minds and our patience and our plants. Presently we have dozens of seedlings sitting in trays in our makeshift greenhouse. Tiny, fragile, but life filled little sprouts are beginning to poke their heads through the soil. Looking at these tiny little two inch seedlings it’s hard to believe that a hundred days from now some of them will be nearly six feet tall and covered in ripe fruit. They won’t get there quickly and it won’t be without struggle. Already we have a fan blowing over them so that the roots and stalks can grow stronger by resisting the blowing of the wind. In time we will start putting them outside to harden them to the cool temperatures and eventually they will have to be uprooted from their indoor incubators and be replanted outdoors. This isn’t much to us, but for these little plants it will be a difficult journey, yet a necessary one. If we didn’t do these things they would not survive to become what they were created and designed to be.
When we moved back to the Tennessee Valley from Florida, a common question I heard was, “Why in the world would you leave Florida?”, and I have to admit, during these long, cold winter nights I’ve asked myself that question several times. I learned something strange about myself during my years in Florida — I missed the harsh, barren bleakness of winters in Tennessee. The first winter in Florida was amazing. I vividly remember a Valentine’s day where Honey and I were in Tampa for a Harry Connick Jr concert and walking out of the restaurant after dinner I commented about the flowers and how green everything was and how I was able to wear short sleeves in February. That year, on Christmas Day my youngest took great joy wearing a Santa hat and riding jet skis around the lake. That first winter in Florida I understood why the snowbirds came from up north to the Deep South after Christmas, but then…..I started to grow tired of everything being blue skies, green trees and sunshine year round. Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas stopped feeling “right” without the landscape around them changing. Halloween was hot, we ate Thanksgiving dinner outside, and Christmas just didn’t look like Christmas as I was accustomed to it. I know, I know, first world problems, but it was all true. I longed for the cold, grey, barren, and harsh. I had started to take for granted the blues skies and sunshine because I rarely had a day without it. We need the cycles and seasons of life.
I think there are great lessons in this for much more than how to view the terrain. There are so many valuable, beautiful, or important things in our lives that are hidden from plain view because they are buried in busyness or overgrown with our being overextended. Things long neglected can be seen in their current, dilapidated condition. Overlooked treasures are shown to be within our grasp if only we would take the time to clear a path.
Yesterday we started making our preparations to transition from the short, cold, dark days of winter, to the long, verdant and beautiful days of spring, a season when everything comes back to life. We enter the season of spring with anticipation and joy because we’ve endured the season of winter with patience and endurance, and opened ourselves to learn the lessons the season had to teach us, seeing the things only it can reveal.
I’ll end with the best summation I have available to me today, lyrics from New Orleans musician Andrew Duhon:
Dark storms will come to bring you dark days
Rivers will rise and what they want they will take
But that storm will pass and you will remain
Save the tears in your eyes, love, leave that to the rain
Its gonna take a little rain
To let the grass beneath us grow
Its gonna take a little rain
'Fore the flowers start to show
Sure we'd all want it our way
But there's some things we don't know
Just trust that on the way to beautiful
Its gonna take a little rain
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