Where I live, Spring comes in with a flirty, jagged edge.

On my run today my shoe crunches a perfect pale blue eggshell on the cold sidewalk. The air is moist and cool, the ground pulses.

There are blushing pink cherry buds that cling to grey, shivering tree branches. Frilly daffodils tremble with their heads hanging low, dejected.

This season is a contrast of energies. There is the bright hope to unfurl and reveal a delicate tenderness, even while the stubborn cold wishes to blow it all away.

How can such tender things survive?

And like the closed up bulb, I’m also a bit wary of the lengthening days of sun.

I swirl my fuzzy scarf twice around my sternum to warm my throat.

In the way that I have always felt wound up in a skein of delicate fibers, all bound together, protectively, snug.

I’ve always been sensitive. And I used to see that as an insult, or a criticism, anyway.

How wrong I’ve been, to accept that, to hide myself.

It was always in my softness that lay my strength.

I’m annoyed at the world’s insistence that we move so quickly from the seed to the flower. That we stuff down the tenderness that pulls at the seams, sometimes with a rendering that really hurts.

That we define the world as one thing or another. Strong or weak.

But it is this melancholy of springtime that lays it all out. A reminder to me of the scratchy discomfort that means I am alive. The delicate egg poaching from the bubbles of the pan.

The seasons are always a blend. I’m a grandmother and I am the little girl who pulled up all the buds in the neighbor’s yard.

Middle age is a reckoning with the culture that insists we must love cleanly, without confusion or regret or any mess.

For me, the love is all the same.

These days I really miss my kids, who aren’t kids anymore. The complicated longing inside me is the melancholy at work.

It’s in the season, every season.

Grief, side by side with the buttery yellow chicks.