Thaw

And suddenly the world is liquid again. It seems that the grass has forgotten how to be grass; the river has forgotten how to flow. The sidewalks don’t remember the crush of walking feet. We can feel the crocuses coming before they get here. Like smelling sea blocks from the beach, we hear the yellow burst of daffodils. And like last year, to find the world alive is shocking.

Today was the first day of walking in the park and admiring the ducks in their muddy splendor. While we mere mortals looked for parking, someone proposed marriage to his lover on a park bench. By the time we turned the corner onto Beacon, they had forgotten the world. We found magical parking two store fronts from the restaurant. People wandered into lunch without jackets, and wandered out to walk without a destination.

Nothing is pretty yet. This is only the prelude to life, the sounds of the orchestra pit ten minutes to curtain. The weeping willows sag a yellow brown, covered in manic, fat squirrels. The pond in the park is still drained, one long sorry puddle wallowing beneath the foot bridge. Last summer’s grass will prick your bare feet with stiffness, and a still-melting, grey snow litters the curb.

We are no better, perhaps. We have rushed outside in our sweats, too eager for breathing the damp, musty air deeply to stop and preen before a mirror. We are pale. We look like we haven’t stretched all winter. We are too used to being huddled and cold, and the desire for a lover that blooms with rains and barbecues is barely moving somewhere inside our spines.

Nothing is beautiful yet. The sky turns that warm blue-grey reserved for spring skies and the sun sets vaguely behind cottony clouds. The air is thick with everything that is yet to happen; winter’s impoverished breezes have escaped to someplace sick with lack of imagination. We dream, vividly, of past and present and future together in a moment that makes sense. Old friends reenter gracefully, new faces are familiar, and we awake with a rush of this wet air promising tulips and lilacs and idle afternoon strolls.

Out at the Common pedestrians forget to heed walk signals, but cars with their windows open and music hushed pause graciously for the absentminded. Iced coffee sweats into the eager, chilled hands of these Sunday strollers, dogs rediscover squirrel-chasing and digging in soft earth, leaving leashes to trail in the mud. There is nothing to see out here, no scents to entice would-be couch potatoes away from their Wiis, and yet the world is inside-out in celebration or anticipation. Someone even wears sandals.

To wake this way is bewitching again and again. It is something beach-braggers in Florida, I imagine, miss without knowing it. To walk outside one day and discover that you have been neglectful and sonambulent; to sense your body melt and move and to feel all the desires you forgot you had: this is the thaw.

Stubborn and irreplaceable, Boston's charm sings again.