The Promise of Spring
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I have spoken before of my frugal journey to not using my dryer, but today is a huge milestone. Although hanging everything inside over the winter was a new experience this year, I have been hanging things to dry outside during warmer weather for as long as I have been married. Maybe because my own mom did it, and there was nothing I loved more than crisp, fresh smelling sheets that had just come off the line. That is one of those memories from childhood that I can still vividly recall every detail of to this day.
Today is the day I long for throughout the long, cold, and very harsh winters we have, especially the past couple of years. In fact, February had an average temperature of 13 degrees. Nuts! My outside line hangs directly outside my laundry room window, so close that I could touch it if the window didn’t provide a barrier, and as the wind swirls and the snow piles up day after day while I am in my laundry room doing laundry my heart seems to get heaver and heavier at times. In the middle of December when I look out and see that line whipping around in the wind, the weight of knowing how long it will be before I can ever hang things out there again seems extraordinarily heavy.
I have always hung out my laundry for as long as possible in the fall/winter, and again as early as possible in the spring. Generally the last load goes out in early November, and the first one goes out sometime in March, although it has been well into April before, too.
It was a couple of years ago when I finally pinpointed why I love hanging out laundry so much, frugality set aside, of course. But even bigger than the savings aspect is the huge benefit I get in those little pockets of time that I am out there, often several times a day of multiple loads need to be dried. On warm summer days I have been out there at 6 a.m. and again at 11 p.m. by the time the last load comes off with several trips out in between. During those times outside my soul gets filled, my face gets warmed by the splendor of the sun, and my heart simply sings. Those times are my respite from the craziness of the day, and they are times that I have to be alone with my thoughts since I can’t ever seem to recruit anyone to come out and help, which really suits me just fine.
As I went out there today, for the first time since November 4, I breathed deeply, I tipped my head back, and I felt the warmth of the sun on my face. If I were a little girl wearing a frilly dress I would have been twirling and whirling in circles in pure delight.
Every trip out there is a gift to me, but this first trip in the spring every year signals not only the rebirth of spring, but a rebirth in my soul. I suffer with seasonal affective disorder…I manage, I cope, and I live intentionally in the moments I’ve been given that all carry me through, but the first trip out to my laundry line every spring means I have made it. I have made it through yet another winter (there can be months were we are covered in a thick, blanket of clouds for weeks at a time), and I have swung around the other side of this mountain that winter seems to place in my path every year.
There may still be snow on the ground, and I am not naive enough to think that I won’t be out shoveling again this season, probably more than once, but this is proof that there is a season for everything. This first trip out there signals that brighter days are to come, both in my surroundings and in what I feel in the very depths of my soul.
I drank in the majesty of the blue sky, I filled my lungs to capacity with the fresh air, and I marveled at the sounds of the birds that are singing their own songs of joy in their return to the places they abandoned last fall. At times it feels like a little piece of my heart gets abandoned, too, as the winter winds appear on the horizon – a most unwelcome guest in my life. But today, my soul was filled, my whole heart rejoiced, and my spirit soared like an eagle in the endless blue sky. The promise of spring appeared today, and what a gift it is.
