TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

My daughter is a decisive, intuitive person. If you ask what her favorite of anything is, she has an answer. Her favorite place? New York City. Her favorite dessert? Chocolate layer cake. And her favorite season? She's clear: fall. She loves the coziness of the cooling temperatures, the changing leaves, the “sweater weather.” She loves bonfires and hot tea and fall holidays.

She also claimed to know which seasons are her brother’s favorite and mine. She said Rhett is, and I quote, a “summer kid.” He likes to play outside all day, and he loves barbecue and popsicles, and he tans easily (while she and I freckle and burn). I smiled at how she’d clearly been paying attention, and I agreed with her characterization. But what about me?

“Spring,” she said. “Definitely spring.”

“Okay, why?” I asked her, slightly bemused. It was a kind of challenge: Prove to me why I’m a spring person. I didn’t disagree with her assessment, but I was curious about her logic!

She said it’s because I love nature, and I get excited about the flowers and the trees blooming. She said she knows how much I love when the birds are out in full force. She’s right! There are things I love about every season, but my favorite seasons are the transitional ones, spring and fall, when the landscape is starting to wake up, and when it’s drifting off to sleep. And of the two, I’d pick spring in a heartbeat.

I have the worst spring fever every year, because the winters in Ohio are so long and so bleak and gray. When the landscape comes alive and turns green again, I’m nearly drunk with joy. I’m in noticing heaven: “Look at the buds on the trees!” and “Breathe in that green smell!” I don’t even mind that the birds wake me up at four o-clock in the morning with their too-early songs. It’s the best alarm clock.

Spring is to the year what morning is to the day: a time when the world opens its eyes, stretches, and rises. Today’s poem celebrates this hopeful start.

The Beginning
by Katherine Gibbel

It is spring

          in the yard

A remnant A shard

          The light

cooling in its glass

          A pocket

museum A natural

          history

of music On the

          party line

the first person

          listens to spring

peepers A chorus of frogs

          in an ancient play

They’re saying

          hello to the pond

They’re saying

          admire this cross

on our backs

          They’re saying

come

          The horizon buckles

in the late light

          She drives

toward it

          There’s so much

to see

          The bud erupted

when she wasn’t looking

          The daffodil crowned

herself at the edge

          of the chessboard

field

          The world repeated itself

then doubled back

          down the road

Still the frogs

          held the limelight

singing about love

          I kissed the second

person’s eyes

          The garden 

alive with itself

“The Beginning” by Katherine Gibbel from LITTLE SOUND © The University of Chicago. Used by permission of the University of Chicago Press.