So, I find that it may finally be spring.
This is a good time of year -- the best time of year, I think. It both reminds me of what I've done during springs like this in the past and involves me inextricably with my coming future, as the world shakes off the last clinging bits of last season and leaps irresistibly up. This was even particularly true, I thought, during the bizarre cold snap on Tuesday. Though the weather was both frigid and appallingly wet, I felt that the damp just made the growing land seem all the richer and more supple, and the chill made the water in the air bite at my nose until I knew it was Spring with every sense.
The season isn't all about growth, of course. I am much with my own past, these days; every high wind or soft sunset reminds me of some earlier day or conversation.
In late March of my fifth grade year, for example, I had the rare and tremendous honor of finally being permitted to take down one of the Red Level spelling books. My grade school had a long-established system of spelling education which was certainly one of the most horrific manipulations of children I have ever seen.
These books were a caste system based on one's powers of spelling. It was actually cool to be in the higher levels, and that was explicitly shown by the vile cover designs. The lowest level of the grouping, Brown, was colored a filthy, excremental brown and decorated with a disturbing picture of a monstrously distorted rat clawing at the air.
Breaking out of this terrible spelling dungeon, one proceeded painfully through a series of gradations until reaching the pinnacle, the Red, a book whose cover positively glowed through our darkling classrooms with a soul-soothing crimson and was decorated with a picture of an incredibly gregarious dog standing on a cliff overlooking a gorgeous valley as a wind ruffled his opulent fur.
I mean, this was just terrible stuff. And people would so arrogantly display their books in the higher levels, crushing those who couldn't get a handle on spelling with rich colors and pretty pictures.
This has been in my head a great deal, especially in this springtime of my second year when academics flash out from the dim outlined frame of our lives into plain fact, as we are all forced to choose our majors and file our papers and make everything definite.
Because this season isn't just about me being much with my past. It's also about the sudden violence of new growth, sometimes ugly and cruel in its insistent egoism. Things change as the winds change, and as we change so does the weather. I'm living now in a single room in my apartment, my first solo housing in the last 18 months, and that's great; I can watch movies whenever I want, and sleep or wake according to my own pleasure.
And there are the rougher changes, too. Spring's the season for growth and death alike, and in no other season are the plans we build so carefully across the year as liable to fall apart and cascade down around us in bits and pieces of what we once hoped.
Once upon a time, I planned to teach myself German in my spare time. Instead, I forgot French. I planned to learn judo; I remain a non-ninja. I planned to breeze through statistics; recently my stat professor informed us that our class will soon becoming "significantly more difficult." I planned to write my first novel; instead, I continue to scratch my Life columns together at the last second. I planned to do my schoolwork regularly and revel in meeting deadlines and being prepared for class. My failure to keep this plan forced me to spend almost all of break typing briefs of Supreme Court cases until my hands went numb.
I planned all these things, and I planned much more important things, too, and this season has proved poisonous to all those plans. And that's not so great.
But I stayed up recently until six in the morning with my best friends in this life, and though plans fall apart and my memory never seems to grow dim, the world still goes on as it has.
So, my friends, we're at the start of this new bright, harsh season, and I'm not quite sure what the right pattern is for these days. Still, I'm in Charlottesville, and that's comforting. Enjoy the spring; just don't plan too carefully.
Connor's column runs biweekly on Fridays. He can be reached at sullivan@cavalierdaily.com.
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