photo by Collyn Ware
“The morning air was like a new dress. That made her feel the apron tied around her waist. She untied it and flung it on a low bush beside the road and walked on, picking flowers and making a bouquet… From now on until death she was going to have flower dust and springtime sprinkled over everything.”
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
If I could leap into the spring air, flinging my back leg so joyously that my heel catches my wind-worthy hair, throwing my arms back with abandon, I would do it. Today, everything is like a new dress. Today is a day for flinging off aprons and malaise, for ordering up some flower dust and springtime sprinkled over everything.
May is a flinging and sprinkling time, the finally-spring days between winter and summer. There are tadpoles in the pond, rose-breasted grosbeaks have returned, and peonies are full-to-bursting. Anything and everything seems possible.
When the morning air was like a new dress, Zora Neale Hurston’s Janie awakens to possibilities that previously only danced around the edges of her life. The circumstances for a poor, young black Southern woman had not changed. But Janie sees beyond these circumstances, beyond a life of servitude to others, to the men who would be her husbands, to heartache and striving. She flings her apron and calls upon love.
In this season of uncertainty where dark circumstances roll in around us, pressing their thunderous weight upon us, we would do well to follow Janie’s lead. As the nuclear testing continues, as oppressors persist in oppressing, as factions banter and fight, we might as well just fling off our aprons. If only for a day, a glorious May day. Or perhaps if only for a moment of pure, unadulterated springtime sprinkling. We were made for this, and lest we forget the beauty of flower dust and new dresses, we should go about leaping, gaining whatever height we can.
Pablo Neruda claimed that You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep Spring from coming. Daily, there are those who are bent on cutting the flowers, plucking their blossoms and shearing their stems to the ground. These are the hell-in-a-hand-basket folks. While the child down the lane loads her basket to the brim with violets, they persist in dragging their brittle baskets of solemnity and fear. They will not see that you cannot keep Spring from coming. Worse yet, when it comes, they will miss it all.
And there is so, so much to miss! In My Antonia, Willa Cather writes:
After that hard winter, one could not get enough of the nimble air. Every morning I wakened with a fresh consciousness that winter was over. There were none of the signs of spring for which I used to watch in Virginia, no budding woods or blooming gardens. There was only—spring itself; the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere: in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm, high wind—rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive and playful like a big puppy that pawed you and then lay down to be petted. If I had been tossed down blindfold on that red prairie, I should have known that it was spring.
Cather understands that spring lives without budding woods or blooming gardens. There was only–spring itself. . . the vital essence of it everywhere. Even on the red prairie, blindfolded, she is certain that she would revel in the nimble air and know that it was spring. Reveling, flinging, sprinkling–it’s all good. Even the oldest, most stoved-up of us feels nimble enough in spring.
Nimble enough to kneel on the ground, trowel in hand, flats of petunias and impatiens and geraniums before us. Our fingers tremble at the sight of spring soil, and as Margaret Atwood writes, In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.
In Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie Mae Crawford’s first two marriages–one arranged, one chosen–had left her springless, suffocating, and stifled. After two decades, she awakens, flings off her aproned life, and runs to Florida with Teacake, a younger man who, she believes, offers her a final flinging of the weight and loss of her previous life. Hope and love spring eternal. She leaps into new possibilities with the confidence and certainty of one who still believes in flower dust.
In a Season of Flinging and Sprinkling, our former hopes and plans may still be springless, the dried and withered essence of buds-never-bloomed. Such is life. But if we refuse to loosen our apron strings, we refuse a season of new germination. Japanese haiku writer, Matsuo Bashō writes:
Dead my old fine hopes
And dry my dreaming but still…
Iris, blue each spring
Like many, I have to remind myself, daily, that there will be Iris, blue each spring. I have to rise with expectation and plans for flinging. I pray to see my day through flower dust and with springtime sprinkled over everything. This seems like such easy, joyous work. And some days it is; other days, it is simply work. It is easier to cling than fling. Cling to impending gloom, listen to the voices of darkness and fear, double-knot my apron strings. These are days of doubting and dreading, followed by nights of dreamless sleep.
Still, dry dreams and dry bones can come to life in the Season of Flinging and Sprinkling. This, I will stake my apron on. And tonight, I will enter my home smelling of dirt and flower dust.
