Spring comes quickly.

I find myself unprepared.

January and February were like hiding places.

Pathetic fallacy of bare branches and short days.  Staying inside.

Snow brought silence and softness.   I felt safe when I woke up to find it snowing.

Now rolling in like waves I can not stop: my 35th birthday, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and the one year anniversary of your death.  Every day pushes me towards that one.  The one that will say, “Yes, an entire revolution has passed…each season without him…this is real…

and final.

What I got from my counselor last week is that the feeling of isolation is supposed to happen.  Friends go back to their lives, which forces me to realize I don’t have a life to go back to…that’s when I need to create one.  It’s not a rebuilding.  It’s a new birth.  It will take work.  I am tired.  I will cut back on our activities for a while and gather up some strength.

I am asking you lately- where you are.  “Where are you?” I say quietly into the air in our bedroom.

I water the cello- I keep forgetting…on purpose.

I wear your socks.  It started because all of mine were in the laundry, but then I figured why not?  I never understood how you fit your size 10-1/2 feet into those socks.  Often you’d accidentally put my socks in your drawer after folding up the laundry, and I’d be searching around for them.  You were wearing them unknowingly.  I’d ask you how you squeezed your feet into them, but I guess you were used to it.  Yours are fitting me perfectly, so I take a little bit of you everywhere I go.  If I look at the bottoms, I can almost pretend they’re your feet, but smaller.  I see the areas that were worn and getting thin.

A Lithuanian friend told me many years ago that in her language March comes from the word, “To fight.”  It is a battle for renewal and rebirth.   I’m not really rooting for Spring like I usually do.  She doesn’t need my help though.  She’ll pull through like she always does.

Today I enter March without you.  Fighting.