Spring has forced its way onto the earth, prying up the icy fingers of winter. The battle wages between bareness and new life, between seeds bursting open and late frost killing cold. The flower bulbs orient their embryonic shoots from the chill beneath, up towards the softening earth above. Seeds rest in their shells with the eternal patience of the dead.
Winter brings out the last of its arsenal, fighting to its bitter end with winds and snow-making clouds. Spring surges forward with its breath of warm air, and the trees and shrubs prepare their battalions of new buds.
Time seems to pause. The combatants entrenched between continued death and new life.
And then, the dead air is cracked open with the sound of the trills of an advancing warm front. Daffodils explode open their yellow petals. Crocus fling shoots upward. Wild violets camouflage in tender grasses. Forsythia jettisons forth their troops of gold. Cherry blossoms leap forth from their coffin twigs.
Each battle is waged with cold wind and warm sunshine, but life forces push out of dead twigs, branches, limbs, and seeds, releasing the captives. Winter melts away in surrender. Spring celebrates its victory with butterflies and bees; warm breezes and fluffy clouds; weeping willows and redbud trees.
Alison Cloonan is a sixty year-old emerging writer, recently completing her college creative writing class with Ms. Amanda Miller and is now submitting work, both from the class and previous writings, for publication.
