Witch Hazel
Some time in the before,
I pulled my jacket close around my wrists while we stood chatting in the middle of the garden path. We hadn't seen this friend in some time, but it was wonderful to catch up as he worked. Eventually he drew us to a close. "I'm sorry, I should let you guys get back to your walk," he said. "You look cold."
I waived him off. "It's my own fault," I said. "This is my spring jacket, and I have a bad habit of believing that I can force spring to arrive by dressing for it."
“In that case,” he said, “you're right on time. Look over there.”
He pointed at a witch hazel bush, both fuzzy and sparse at the same time, its spidery yellow blooms stark against all the gray and brown detritus that made up the rest of the garden.
“The witch hazel is the harbinger of spring. If it's here, spring is here - however early and cold it may be.”
In March 2020, a number of things happened.
One of which was, a number of things became my "lasts."
The last time I ate in a restaurant was on March 6th - a microbrewery in Kansas City, where I spent most of the time extolling the sun’s warmth on my back as we stood outside waiting for a table. It was finally 60* and still breezy, but it was the best I'd felt in months. I'd already been white knuckling it through seasonal depression and the most stressful year I'd ever endured at work.
It was the last time I hugged dear friends goodbye.
I didn't know at the time how long this "last" would last.
In March 2020, a number of things happened. One of which was, I cried a lot.
As reports came in and it became clear that there would be no substantive help for low-income, front line workers, I was flooded with what was about to happen. How many would die when it was preventable. How much we would lose. How much I didn't know and still knew. I laid flat on my back on the floor of my hastily-thrown-together home workspace and sobbed until my body hurt, but I couldn't sob anymore.
In March 2020, a number of things happened. One of which was, I quit my job.
I made a heart wrenching, but right, decision. I walked away without another job lined up, right as the pandemic began its long act of pulling the rug out from under the employment numbers. I said goodbye to students and colleagues I loved, but only sort of. There was no room for a group gathering, even on Zoom. There were only the facts - and the next day, and the next.
In March 2020, a number of things happened. The largest number of which was: walks.
I took so. many. walks. Usually with a five year old at my side. Both of us were restless, all limbs and all pent up energy in need of a direction. So we walked - at least once a day, often more - all through the neighborhood. It was gray and rainy and cold and the world seemed tilted, but we walked. In rainboots and layers and whining and arguments and crossing the street 17 times to avoid other restless neighbors on the sidewalk, we walked.
I had already been white knuckling it through a tumultuous year of work and seasonal depression. I was at the bottom of my reserve in November, but had kept drilling past and finding new bottoms to work from. My mantra had been, as always, "just make it to March. You just have to survive until March." But March came and we were ejected into a no man's land, with very few handholds and even less information. I walked and scoured the boulevards and garden beds for daffodils and jonquils, crocuses and hens and chicks, but in my haze it seemed like they were late. Even they had been indefinitely postponed.
But there were witch hazels.
To keep walks interesting, I tried to teach my 5 year old the few dozen plants I know to identify. And soon we would walk the neighborhood in a kind of call and response.
What's this one, Ezra? “Lamb’s ears!”
What’s this one? “Clover!”
But more often than the others, it was “What’s this one?”
A witchyhazel?"
Yes, a witch hazel. This is a very special plant. It tells us spring is coming soon.
Over the next days and weeks the roles changed. He called, I responded.
"Mama, a witchy hazel! Right?" Yes love. "So that one tells us spring is coming soon."
And then the refrain was shortened even further, to match the rhythm of small feet pushing a Micro scooter up and down the familiar sidewalks. It took on a cadence like a birdsong, where the notes feel just barely predictable - "There's our witchyhazel! Witchyhazel, witchyhazel, witchyhazel. Spring is coming soon"
The witch hazels became one of the few anchor points that felt solid. On solo walks, each step an attempt to find solid ground, I’d stop and say thanks to them. The pale ones scattered up and down Nebraska Avenue, the older and darker ones all along Sidney Street. Yellow, delicate, otherworldly looking, and yet sturdy as all hell against the remaining weeks of sleet, rain and cold.
When it felt like the entire world had stopped, the witchyhazels were a stubborn witness that it had not.
Spring was still going to come, however early and cold it may be.
In these intervening months, we have seen the world continue to turn in beautiful and horrifying ways. Like most of us, I have normed to this life of seeing few and missing many, normed to drifting in what I have come to call this sea of little griefs.
But now I look around my house and I see yellow - everywhere. Sometime between March 2020 and now, a color that I had never in my life shown any affinity for has bloomed in every room. My couch is the color of the old, dark witch hazel blossoms on Sidney. My rug an eye-catching pattern featuring the paler, younger looking blooms on Nebraska. In throw pillows and tchotchkys and even clothes, I can't cast my eyes around my house without finding these tell tale shades of yellow.
The witchyhazel's witness has burrowed into my bones, somehow.
I do not know what else I will carry forward from this season of survival - I don't know what will come up and what will remain, buried in the time before. But I’m yet again on the other side of my wintertime mantra: Just survive until March. And one more time, I have. Thank everything, I have.
I'm outside a lot more, still dressed a little too light for the current level of chill - these days usually barefoot, mincing my way across the yard to refill my bird feeder. I'm still sitting outside, even when I need to pull my sleeves closed at the wrist and curl into myself to keep warm.
And now there is an irregular drumbeat echoing up from what remains of who I was this time last year, of feet and wheels pushing and gliding on broken pavement. And a call almost like a birdsong.
Witchyhazel, witchyhazel, witchyhazel.
No matter what it feels like, spring is coming soon.
