In An Instant

Springtime in Alberta was such a hesitant yet fleeting moment. It was as if the land was trying to decide whether to stay frozen and flustered or to move forward, to defrost, and to call her friends out to play. “Excuse me Mr. Snow, can Sunshine come play hopscotch with me outside?”

Usually the weather jerked back and forth between snow storms and Chinooks that tripped and tumbled over the landscape, melted every pile of snow still sitting helplessly on the ground, hated by every resident who had stared at it, drove through it, and dug themselves out of it for the last eight months. There’s a reason you never heard, “Hey, lets go play out in the snow” from the lips of an adult.

Then without warning, it was there. Spring had happened. Nature finally got up the guts to snap off the icicles clinging to her and let the green come flowing out.

It was everywhere. Green. Leaves. Grass. The blossoms came and were gone in a week. It was a moment. It was Spring and suddenly it was over and Summer arrived to torch the grass as badly as Winter had cracked the pavement. But it was so fleeting and if you weren’t looking for it, you wouldn’t see it happen. One day you noticed that the river valley wasn’t so grey anymore, just as you didn’t notice yourselves turning from adolescents to adults. You suddenly saw the flush of health flowing through the trees in the river valley. “Oh goodness how you’ve grown! The last time I saw you, you were only this big!”

I was intrigued by the moment you saw the leaves turning yellow. As soon as it happened you spotted it, a single yellow leaf on an elm ruined the rest of the summer, much like when you found a grey hair on your head or in your beard. You saw that abrupt instant of decay and tracked it until finally, that cold and miserable winter you had long anticipated had arrived and every yellow leaf, once green, had dropped to the ground and had been blown away under a bush somewhere, shriveled and dark brown. “When did we get so old?” you asked yourselves.

Spring was an instant, and if you were lucky to be eighty, and paid close attention, you saw those moments, eighty precious fleeting moments, when nature and life budded into something daring, brief, and quickly snuffed out.