To all the dormant and waiting
originally published in The Doorpost, Redeemer School, Spring 2024
Can you see the little girl of the early 90s? She’s sitting in the North Carolina countryside, perched on the red brick steps of the one-story ranch house. Her shirt and shorts are a matching set of sparkling cow spots, and her fuzzy brown hair defies its ponytail. She presses the heels of her hands against her eyes, but it doesn’t hide her tears.
Spring’s warming breath lingers as her mother turns over the flowerbeds. The coming months will bring marigolds and zinnias. The tulips, geraniums, and cosmos will be beautiful. But the little girl cries for the pansies because spring is here. The season of pansies is over.
Her older brother, loving and perhaps a bit distraught, creates a bouquet. Furry, deep-purple faces. Bright yellow throats. A sprinkle of dainty pink and blue violas. He folds them into a paper towel and presses them carefully among the pages of the 1950s World Book Encyclopedia.
Curiosity replaces the girl’s tears. It’s a salve somehow, knowing the pansies aren’t gone. Knowing they rest in the safety of the old pages.
The same girl, plus three decades, is a mother now. Her kids go to school with yours. She’s tired this February morning as the clock flicks to 8:24 and she drives steadily toward Melrose Street, knowing they’ll be one of the last cars.
Still, past her quickening heartbeat, she’s had just enough coffee to awaken her curiosity.
She marvels at the cycles of dishes, dirt, and daily life. How the evenings are brighter now. How there’s only one child in diapers. How Walmart gave them extra apples but rotten oranges. She melts at sounds from the backseat, where two kids read life into Elephant and Piggie. She cowers a little at the upcoming Egypt project, the two dozen cupcakes she promised, and the prospect of e-days yet untaught.
She drops the children at school — in fact, she hardly stops before they burst from the van like eager popcorn kernels.
Now down from five children to one, she drives slowly around the Redeemer campus, sipping coffee. Tiny leaves poke through the grass of the Hawthorne Grounds, a path that will bloom with white and gold. Can you see the daffodils? The brave beginnings of tulips, dahlias, and gladioli?
The equinox is coming, and she knows it. The bulbs know it, too.
“We are created to live rhythmically in the rhythms of creation,” Eugene Peterson says, speaking of our cycles of days, weeks, and months. “But we are also composed of rhythms. Physiologically, we live out rhythms of pulse and breath. Our hearts beat subtly, circulating our blood through our bodies in impulses of 60 or 80 or 100 times a minute. We are embedded in time, but time is also embedded in us.”
A daffodil knows to wait well. The ground warms and the bulb unfolds elegant leaves. Powerful and delicate blooms emerge. Bright yellow petals reach for the sunshine.
Does a daffodil feel sad when it’s time to fade away? Or does it welcome winter, snuggling into the cold earth to rest? Does it ever fear the frost? Or does it contentedly relish its moment of glory while anticipating new days of being fully alive to the world?
Daffodils will come again, and daffodils will fade. The summer sun will scorch the ground, and the bee balm will dance. Chrysanthemums will thrive in autumn, and we’ll plant winter pansies. The children will grow and have children of their own. There will be seasons of rain, seasons of darkness, seasons of triumph, and seasons of quiet. There will be seasons of life, death, surety, waiting, disappointment, rest, and delight. Seasons will mix and merge in contradiction, where we feel the weight of sin and glory. Joy and sorrow. Gratitude and exhaustion.
Driven by the family’s need for more fruit, more milk, more Pirate’s Booty and Cheez-its – the grown-girl-now-mom pauses in the Harris Teeter parking lot and tilts her cup back, catching the last drips of cooled coffee.
While nature has its evergreens, other plants bloom for a day or an hour. Some return on their own. Others need us to choose them each year. Summer is always around the corner, and there will be winter again. Spring isn’t a picture of the dead coming alive: it's the dormant. The wonder of those faithfully living in their season, embracing God’s promises of glory, adventure, and rest.
The pressed pansies are lost, but she treasures the memory: the love of her brother and the reminder that pansies will come again.
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