As temperatures here reached into the 70s in what is still late winter, I can’t help but wonder what is going on. There’s been just one snow day this year and that didn’t happen until late February. It is March 10th and I’ve shoveled snow just three times all winter.
Some would celebrate that news, but I worry about the order of things. There should be snow in the mountains to fill the streams with the thaw of spring. Even so, this week Spring Creek looks good; water flowing fast and dark concealing movements of the trout in its depths.
I love clear winter nights. There’s just something about snow crunching with each footstep, particularly under moonlight casting shadows of leaf-barren trees onto a bluish-white canvas of snow.
From my yard, with the leaves gone, winter’s open vistas afford views across the valley. Sometimes at night I stand like Gatsby, gazing across the water at the light on Daisy’s dock, and just look at the lights of the eastern part of campus. Other nights it’s the silhouette of Mount Nittany dark and silent against a sky of soft moonlit illumination.
While the calendar may say late winter, spring in closing fast. Easter is early this year; just two and a half weeks away.
Maybe it is my advancing age, or maybe the constant motion of a 24/7 world, but time seems to pass faster now. Seasons pass and children grow older right before our eyes. Yesterday’s babies have become today’s teenagers armed with smartphones and their own ideas of how they want to live their lives.
One day I woke up to find that I’m closer to 50 than 40 and that retirement is closer to me than my college days. It is human nature to resent the realization that your lifetime is something finite. There will come a time when you no longer rise with the sun, a springtime when the crocuses sprout from their winter’s rest but you won’t.
There comes a time for all when the days of renewal and rebirth are past. Those dreams belong to the young, people like our children and the students who walk this campus with so much of their lives left to be lived.
For people my age the challenges and freedoms of starting out have faded. There are new tasks every day but your strengths are experience and wisdom rather than youthful energy and enthusiasm. Now you look at your children, at your life’s work and start to think about words like legacy, and the kind of world you want to leave behind.
That is the challenge so many of us ultimately dread; the realization that we too are mortal and that perhaps others will interpret the meaning of our lives. That someday the clock will be winding down and we’ll realize there are things we can never undo. There were decisions that put us on a trajectory into what was once our future but is now our past.
No matter how desperately you want to go back and tell your younger self to make a different decision, or perhaps go back and reassure your younger self that the decision they will make will turn out all right — we can’t do it. Time is linear and there is no reverse.
Spring may be the season of the young, but it is there for all of us to grasp. Maybe we are older but we find renewal in spring cleaning, a garden, a fly line on the water, the sound of a fastball smacking the catcher’s mitt and longer warmer days.
We are lucky to live in Happy Valley where no one is immune to the spell of springtime. In our college town there is an excitement for better weather. Students ditch layers of winter clothes and seem to be everywhere outside lounging in the comfort of spring and summer attire. We see the smiling students enjoying a pint, or even a Long Island Iced Tea the first day that downtown bars open their outdoor seating.
My mind wanders back to a football camp run in March of 1989 when an unseasonably warm day broke winter’s grip. As the team jogged along the campus sidewalk of College Avenue the patrons of Café 210 saw us and started to clap and yell.
What I remember most were some teammates who had graduated the previous December holding up pitchers, pointing and laughing as we went by. Although in that moment they were having a better time, looking back I guarantee they’d have traded places with us in a heartbeat.
But that is the reality of time and seasons… they only move forward and try as we might there is no way to turn back or recapture even one moment of time. The best we can do is awaken our senses as the sun warms our valley in the spring and find joy in every new dawn.
Even if our youth has faded, with Happy Valley’s youthful vibe we can plug into our fountain of youth, find rebirth and be happy that it’s spring again.
