Inbetweens

I think the best indication of the changing seasons is the way the air smells. Not necessarily the temperature or the weather, but the way it smells. Summer smells like long afternoons and warmth, like the residual heat off a barbeque or the way the trees seem to bake in the sun. Late Summer smells like the slightly bittersweet smell of rot that's not far off with Autumn's clawing approach underneath the light, and not unpleasant, smell of heat and sweat and sunscreen and grass. Those smells seem to fade when Fall approaches.

Early fall smells like ripening acorns under the last days of summer heat with the slightly ashen, chilly smell of the weather that lingers around the corner. Mid Autumn has a scent of pumpkins and excitement, the air smells like longer nights and those bittersweet notes of rotting leaves are slowly blanketed by the cold fingers of Winter just around the corner.

Winter smells Gray. Like salt and sterility, the air is devoid and clean like the earth beneath the dead ground is nothing more than a husk, a corpse…. Until spring.

Early spring is not my favorite season. That perfect snow that once blanketed the ground is reduced to slush, a horrible off gray mess of imbedded gravel and hard icy chunks that, when kicked, seem to be about as yielding as my father's iron will. Many a boot has been scuffed and many dainty piglets inside said boot have been deeply bruised for the carelessness I seem to maintain when walking in early spring. Perhaps it's tainted me. It made me despise the season altogether, but I've always believed the earth feels most dead in the betweens.

The season between Autumn and Winter, after the leaves fall and before the snow purifies the ground, and the season between Winter and Spring, when all the snow has melted and before the grass and the trees bloom once again. These seasons are gray and dead, and serve as a perfect conduit to the existential dread I have a hard time placing a finger on, outside of the clutching moments they seem to hold me in.

I cannot envision the loneliness of the Inbetween seasons in the full rapture of Summer's long embrace, or the swinging dance of Springs delicate countenance. I can not picture the sinking feeling of the Inbetween's when Christmas songs pour from my car radio and I can smell the baking of happy relatives or when bright red leaves of Autumn's spectacle blanket my porch and jack-o-lanterns. But it returns. The sinking dread returns and worsens as the Inbetween's return to me once again, and I have a new dinner guest every night. This kind of anxiety that is every present while the world around me is dead.

I think that's why Spring has always felt celebratory. It's the booming party of the natural world. Every single day in spring is different and even my commute to work fills me with absolute bliss as I see yet another tree has exploded with obnoxious and wonderful white puffs of flowers, or another bush has erupted with pink buds. It feels like everyone is putting on their best show, shaking the sand from their eyes and dancing in the dripping prismatic light of an eager sun. I think that's why the first day of spring has always been so special for us.

Now, it should be said that my Mother and I have never kept the canonical measure of what is, and what is not, the first day of Spring. It is arbitrary, and based entirely on which one finally cannot contain their excitement any longer and pronounces to the other that it is, at long last, the first day of spring. And ah my God the tension mounting to that day in borderline ludicrous. I catch myself bouncing in my office chair looking out the window at the blooming dogwood half a mile away. Every, single, morning it puts on a resplendent show like the sun exists only to see it bloom. I see the birds return and the trees explode and I wonder which of us will crack first. Proclaiming that it is finally time, that Spring is finally returned to us and the doldrums of winter are really gone for another year, and we have months and months before the Inbetweens return and so many days of sunshine and bliss.

Inevitably, I run home from work to find my mother as excited as I am. She can see my face from the driveway, and as I have already broken she does the same and we run to each other and squeal in unison that Spring is finally here. We embrace. Her small, petite frame in mine. My father was a bear, a true giant of a man, and I dwarf her by nearly a foot. She feels like the early spring in my arms. Tenuous, but blooming with life and love and happiness and potential. She feels like home to me and as we finish the happy proclamations I step back.

The rest of the day is filled with making tea, pruning the gardens, tending to the yard and refilling the bird feeders. We sit on the old, worn bench in the yard under the weeping willow tree that my grandmother planted with my father and his sisters sixty years ago, and I feel my family around us. I feel like I belong here, I feel like the Inbetweens, the months of loneliness and cold can be forgotten for just a while longer and with the flowers that we're plucked and picked and pruned, my mother once again displays great patience in helping me to construct crowns of wildflowers. It is a skill I have never mastered to the extent she displays, and were I not horrifically mortal, I would accuse her of being a Fae, a fairy or a dryad, for the way her fingers weave everything together as if it were as simple as breathing.

Her crowns are perfect and regal and scream of the liveliness of spring. My crowns are hard-fought battles, stems jutting from places uncomfortably, each one a bit fragile, each one a bit clumsy in execution, but she makes no comment other than to praise. It never feels patronizing.

My mother sits in the passenger seat of my car with a box of the crowns we made on her lap. The road is a little bumpy, but we're almost there. We're almost where we're going. The sun is a bit lower in the sky than I would like, but we still have time. And as we park, I make sure the emergency brake is pulled and exit onto the dirt road, cross the front of the car, and open the door. My mother accepts my hand as I remove the box from her lap and hold it in one arm, her in the other.

She sees me looking at the crowns and grips my arm, sensing my unease with the craftsmanship of my crowns.

"You know, your father has really been looking forward to this," she says matter of factly, a bright smile across her face. "He has always loved that you were able to find leaves, still red, and make him something with them. He feels like a king with that kind of garb."

She pulls away from me, standing on the tips of her toes to reach inside and grab one of my crowns. She holds it in her small, trembling hands like it's the hope diamond, and I feel as small now as I ever have. She tucks a jutting stem back into the crown and turns on her heel, the hem of her dress pulling out from her like an umbrella at her theatrical movements as she turns and walks away.

I kick the car door closed, holding the heavy box with two hands as she leads me off through the field of graves.

My mother put my bright red leaf crown on a tombstone, not yet colored with age or the passage of time, and I see her genuinely smiling through a desperate flow or diamond tears. My mother talks for a long time, about how the neighbors are doing, about how well my job is going, about how much she loves him and how excited she is to have him with her through the coming seasons. She talks about how she can feel him when the coffee machine goes off in the morning, and how much she appreciates when he helps her with something silly, like finding her keys or reminding her where she placed her ring. I am ashamed of how little I have to say. My throat is closed around a knot, like an acorn the size of an orange is nestled inside my windpipe. It's hard enough just to breathe. But she knows, and she doesn't ask me for anything. She doesn't even turn to look at me as she allows me my private moment of pure, unbridled sadness.

I have disliked the Inbetweens since I was a child, they were cold, they were hollow, and they made me deeply sad. My father died in the middle of Summer, and I realized at that point that the Inbetweens were not just relegated to the period where the world seemed to die around me. An Inbetween could take root in your soul, even when the world around you is vibrant.

I felt my mother's hand on my arm again. Her watery eyes leaked down across her reddened face, but her smile was pure and genuine. She had said her goodbye's and left the crown atop the stone that was far too small for such a big man. Such an important man. For a moment I understood mausoleums, and catacombs, and the castles and the pyramids built for those that were loved. A stone is never enough. The whole world should have bent at the knees for what had been lost from it. But maybe now wasn't the time to wax philosophically… There was still a box of crowns.

By the time my mother sat again in the passenger seat of my car, she held an empty box. And she was empty too. She sat in silence, tears having long since dried on her face, with the tender smile of a woman who was deeply sad, but unwilling to let it take her again. The Inbetweens were behind us now, and our Spring tradition had been fulfilled with all the decorum, with all the love, with all the emotion we had in us. The year could begin again.

I sat for a long time in the driver's seat. The early spring, to me, smells like flowers, and potential. It has the slightly pungent scent that comes right before the rain and all the blooms of a forest that is just waking up again, but it also smells a little bit like salt. A remnant of the Inbetween that preceded it. A reminder of the emptiness one can feel and why the smell of flowers and rain should be cherished above all else when it is noticed. Because it won't always be there.

I picked up the box from my mother's lap. I threw it in the backseat. I pulled her gently into my arms.

It's been a year since I sat in this same place with my mother. It's been a year since my offensive tires kicked up dust on this dirt road, and it's been a year since she allowed me my peace to grieve. This year, the box of flower crows is empty, but so is the seat beneath it. And I sob, shamelessly, into my hands.

The flower crowns I made were even worse than last year. Probably worse than ever. But I'm here. I made them. And I promised myself that on the first day of Spring I would return, even as this Inbetween threatens to swallow my insides and drag me down with it. But I remember my mom. I remember the dignity she had as she spoke to my father, to my grandparents, to my sister and my aunts. I remember the way she loved, and the way she made me appreciate the life, and the potential of spring, and as I lean my head back and heave for breath, ugly tears and a runny nose bared for the world to see, I remember why we celebrate the first day of Spring.

To remember that the Inbetween's don't last forever. To remember that the sorrow, the loneliness, the darkness, forces you to live for every breath of fresh flowers.