Tree Buds

"I bought a ring."

These words flashed up at me from my cell phone screen as I shut my phone off. I was in an airplane, coming home from my sister's funeral in another state. I had to shut my phone off--the plane was about to take off, so that's all I got to see and know for several hours.

But the significance of those four words was not lost on me. My heart, which had been through a lot lately, leaped with new emotions. A thrill went up my spine, and air left my lungs.

They meant that my oldest child, my firstborn son, the center of my heart since his birth, was about to take a life-altering step. One with significant ramifications, eternal consequences.

I sat huddled in my black clothes, hugging my black jacket to me, next to the dark window, imagining all sorts of new possibilities. In my mind, I could see the sparkle of the diamond, the light in my son's face as he had contemplated this move, my future daughter-in-law's luminous eyes.

It was the dead of winter.

On the first day of spring, exactly two months after my sister's tortured death by cancer, I watched one of my beloved nieces emerge from the temple in a lacy ivory dress with her cute new husband. Everything from her sunlit face to the long darkest-yet-brightest-yellow-possible (saffron, she called it) ribbon wrapped around her slim waist and trailing down the back of her dress said, "Spring is here." Here was the embodiment of new life and young love with endless possibilities.

On the way home from work today, I played a game with myself called, "What month does it look like?" Ahead of me were the gray granite mountains east of the city, frosted with ice and snow. Nearer by, lawns were partly green, partly brown. Trees, except for evergreens, were bare. At first glance, it wasn't clear. "Well," I reasoned, "it's definitely not July, June, or August." I then ruled out May and September. April? No. The green would be more pronounced. Pale leaves would be coming out in the trees. September? No, not with that much snow on the mountains. That left anything from October to March.

As I continued to drive, I peered furtively into gardens in the front of buildings, hoping for some sign that would tell me, definitively, the month. Two blocks went past, and then, just before turning into my driveway, I saw it--a tree puffing dark but full buds out along its branches. "March," I sighed with relief.

Not that I didn't already know that.

But, sometimes, in the midst of bleakness--of the season, or of life, or recession, or lost love or opportunity, it can be hard to see the buds coming out, promising newness and life.