By Drew Minard

Flowers bloom, sinuses drain, feelings from winter begin to thaw and everyone is gearing up, sweating for summer. Springtime in New York is so often skipped over! With summer in the city almost objectively being the most amazing time of the year, close in competition with cozy autumn, I find that the moment the sun begins to shine in early April or even March, before any type of beach days or sweating sun, I hear exclamations of “Summer Has Begun!” Yet, I encourage myself, and you, dear reader, to not so quickly skip right over an important albeit sneeze-prone season of the year! 

It’s a problem plaguing many of us in our lives right now, rushing onto the next and the next and the next, and with the eight o’clock sunsets, Central Park darties, and lush getaway trips out of the sweating city, I don’t blame anyone for wanting to rush toward the sweet summer months of June and July. Yet, shouldn’t we slow down to enjoy the blooming of it all first? Can’t we embrace the sneezing out of our winter blues and sit in the presence of springtime for just a bit longer?

I love summer! I love its shine. My birthday is smack-dab in the middle of July. If I ever have a spare second in the summertime, you can find me on a towel on a chair on my rooftop high above the city, worshipping the golden sun. However, the quicker we wish something on, the quicker it leaves us. The more we embrace our sweet sister Spring, the more we’ll be able to enjoy our hot and fun friend Summer!

We’ve all done a lot of soul searching and hibernating as the winters always go. It’s an important part of the life cycle. To hibernate is to dig deeper into those parts of ourselves we’d maybe rather leave by the wayside while we’re by the beachside. It’s hard work! And by the time May rolls around, we’re ready to forget our troubles and jump right to High Noons at high noon, but through the allergies, the constant rain showers, and the allergies, we have the opportunity to see springtime as a true full season of it’s own!

I’m writing this on the 17th of May. It’s been raining for a week and a half. By the astronomical calendar, summer doesn’t belong to us for another month, so I urge you, sweet sunshine loving reader, swallow some pill-form Vitamin D and don’t move on so fast!

We often associate spring with “springing” forward; in time, in length of days, in length of our social tolerance, but the word spring actually comes from the Germanic sprenganan, which means “the act or time of springing or appearing; the first appearance; the beginning, birth, rise, or origin.” A birth! A suddenly blooming flower in Central Park? The final icicle dripping off of a leaky rooftop gutter? How could we forget that spring is the start of so much new? Such blooming deserves our true attention. Winter in Manhattan, though I’ve happened to almost nearly evade it for the last two years, (thank you out of state theatre,) can be brutal. So lonely, so cold, so rigid. Springtime is our first recurrence back into the modern world. Springtime is a birth for the flora and fauna of our Earth, including us! I could even petition for the American New Years Holiday to be postponed from the lonely and cold January 1st to the warm and thawing March 20th!

Spring is also one of our great transition periods. From a deep winter cold to high-flying summer warmth, spring allows us the opportunity to slowly emerge and acclimate our bodies to the new temperate climate. The transitory periods in our lives are just as crucial as those moments that bring us victory or celebration or climax.

Andre Aciman discusses the importance of transitory states in his book of essays, Homo Irrealis, adopting the term “Irrealis moods.” Aciman describes these moods as “counterfactual moods [that] include the conditional, the subjunctive, the optative, and the imperative, all best expressed… as the might-be and the might-have-been.” “Optative” rings strong and true toward my sentiment of spring here; the state of if only. What a way to sum up the way we feel after a winter thaws. Those thoughts that plague us during the winter months begin to thaw too. “What if I did this?” “If only I did this!” The blooming and transitory spirit we feel in these early months of spring is a purposeful motion toward progress in our personal life journeys and shouldn’t be anything to be afraid of.

Even now, as I finish this piece in early June, (a fast writer I am not!) I am urged to continue these lessons in reflection and contentment in my transition toward summer. I hope you will too. These in-between moments in our lives are the moments that will allow for time to move slower, for our precious lives to feel longer. If we embrace these in-between seasons, our days will feel more innumerable and worthwhile. I will make sure to celebrate summer when I am meant to celebrate it, but for now, I will stop and smell the flowers, no matter how much they make me sneeze. I’ll let myself feel the true essence of springtime. A reappearance, a resurgence, a new kind of life.