Vernal

Today has been the first day that has had any spring in it in a long time. Springtime has always meant, for me, open windows, a scratchy throat, happy warm limbs, eyes puffed shut from attacking histamines, and the dizzying relief of Spring break (I'm someone who never really left school, and probably never really will). But now that I'm a parent, spring is no longer just spring. It's vernal.

Vernal mens springlike or of spring, but it also means "belonging to or characteristic of youth." Now Spring means, on the first day that's soared above 50 degrees since, probably, October, watching my 3-year-old daughter stand up from drawing on the driveway with chalk and say, "Now is a perfect time for me to take off my clothes." First the shirt, followed shortly by the pants, and there she is in her blue underwear and pink Crocs and nothing else at all, calling herself Mowgli and scratching her yet-unmarked back against the bark of a tree with utter and total glee. After the tree, raking leaves with her dad (or, more accurately, un-raking what he'd just raked) and after the leaves, the mud, of course. Oh the mud. At this point, her Crocs fly, as if of their own will, off of her yet-unmarked and childishly smooth feet, and those feet find and feel and flex in that mud. The soil and a shovel and the freedom to run around in her underwear seems to be all this child needs to have fun in Spring. Sometimes I wonder why we even bother to buy toys, and then I remember: oh yeah, Winter.

Then, for Mowgli, an emergency tub followed by a necessary nap, and after nap and dinner, in the too-rapidly fading light we all head outside again, drinking every drop of this early spring day as if we're not sure we'll ever get another like it. So in twilight we spread out a blanket on the front lawn for the 4 of us, though only 2 of us stay: my daughter and my husband find their way back to the driveway and draw chalk figures in the early dark; my son (who is still a baby) and I stay on the blanket, where I watch him look up at the moon and the night sky for the first time in his life, waving his limbs in joy and opening his mouth to suck his first spring's air into his lungs and looking, unblinking and amazed, up into the wide sky.

What a world, when this is the world.