Gabrielle’s Magical Notebook

It was supposed to have been spring. The sky was supposed to be blue and the birds were supposed to be organizing their duets. The grass was supposed to be turning green and the flowers were supposed to growing and blooming and making the world turn colorful. But instead the sky is gunship gray, the birds are cowering in their sopping nests, the grass all turned to mud and the flowers are drowning in their flooded beds.

I didn’t know I’d hung so much importance on spring coming. Here I thought that I was just looking forward to it like it was a treat that had been hinted at by a doting uncle. Turns out I needed spring to come like I need to eat every morning.

It had just been a hard winter. The wind bit into me every time I stepped outside making me hunch up into myself away from everyone. First snowfall was almost pretty, but then the dirt and filth of this city turned all that whiteness brown and gray before it even hit the ground. After that, the snow was just something else that was cold and wet and dirty. All the magic’d been drained away and every dancing snowflake had broken its legs before it touched down. I watched them fall from that dark, glowering sky and imagined I could hear them scream the whole way down.

That’s enough to depress a canary, but the thing that got to me the worst was the way the color of the world had changed. We get all ready for winter by walking through autumn with its kaboom of color. Autumn’s like someone put a firecracker in a box of crayons. You step outside your door and there’s reds and yellows and oranges all sitting on bright green grass and standing against a sky so blue it hurts your eyes. I love all that color. I roll around in it and let it cling to me and maybe it makes me better. Then, well, then the leaves turn sickly and fall off the trees. The grass turns brown and clouds roll over the sky like a blanket nobody wants. My whole world turns white and gray and dim and dismal.

But hey, I’d say, spring is coming. The snowflakes would cry and the sun would get all lost in that smog, but I could handle it because, I told myself, spring is coming.

So where is it? Where is my spring? I keep stepping out hoping to see at least some glimpse, but all I can see is how when the snow melted it turned three feet of dirt into six feet of mud. And all the flowers I’d planted, all the color I was hoping so much to see, is drowning and dying in all that mud.

So now I’m standing on the little scrap of earth that’s mine and I’m staring at these plants. They’re just limp, little things all flopped over from the pounding they’re getting from the rain. It’s like the weight of the whole sky just fell on these little plants and knocked them down so hard they can’t get out of the mud.

I’m looking at these sprouts and feeling like I want to hit something when I see a plant growing up between some rocks. It’s still just a little sprout, but already it’s had to push its way through life just to get to the air. It’s got all these rocks around it which almost kept it from growing, but now that it’s there the rocks are keeping it upright in the rain. This plant fought to sprout and now it’s standing tall just daring the rain and the gray and the cold and the mud to beat it down. I look at this little flower plant standing so tall and proud and then I look up at the heavy sky.

Yeah, I say, spring is coming.