Spring is on the Horizon

This year in particular I feel the cumulative dawning of spring. Slowly rising, I’m feeling a bit like a Maine black bear awakening out of a long winter’s slumber. Coming to and slipping back into rest, doing only what I must with the deep confidence built over these past sixty springs that nothing needs to happen immediately. A privilege earned over time, that has not always been so. Today, I bask in the self-kindness this awareness this slow rising affords. 

This has been a winter of contradictions in Maine as well as in our family.  The season is winter but we have had virtually no measurable snow. The cold and dark indicate winter but the wind, the storms and the sea are prevailing SSE. More like summer winds around here.

With these oddities have come devastating storms one after the next tearing apart our shore and coastal communities. Our home on Seashore Ave currently under renovations has been front and center of the action. We are safely ensconced in our historic home on Central Ave. 

Our family is growing and largely gone and yet here at Central Ave, they somehow feel so much more present.  Ed and I are spending this year in the home on Peaks where we raised our children while our home on the backshore undertakes the necessary adjustments that will allow us to hopefully enjoy this final phase of our lives. For us- not a morbid reflection but a curious time of what will come in these years from sixty until what we hope is a long full ageing in place. While that work is undertaken by the fabulous woman owned Peaks Island Local Juniper Design and Build, we retreat back in time to the home on Central Ave, one mile through the center of the island to where we first built our life together on Peaks Island. The family loved being in this home for the holidays. It was deeply comforting to the young adults who I still call the kids.  I meanwhile miss my home on the backshore. 

Here, on Central Ave, the days are more tied to the rhythm of the boat. On the backshore, days are tied to the rhythm of the sunrises and the tides. There were many years where the boat and its schedule framed our lives. Not so much there days. 

We’ve aged. Our family has both grown and shrunk in tandem with the rhythms of life. Today I understand that these seeming contradictions can co-exist. A softening of hardlines and must-dos the gift of this life I’m living in gratitude for the comfort of today’s peace, good health and good fortune. I do so while also grappling with the awareness that from many around the world this is not so. Gratitude and empathy bring me to a deep sense of responsibility. Is it possible to walk lightly through this world? Bring no more trouble whenever possible and keep looking for opportunities to give kindness through words and deeds. A lofty ideal I fall short of constantly. Again, striving toward an idea does not always mean achieving the goal. Progress toward the goal will have to suffice. 

So I face the new season with a sense of both Joy an trepidation. Taking responsibility for only actions I take and continually letting go of predicting the outcome.