Spring Is a State of Mind, and Heart

Spring in California is elusive, more feeling than season. One day it’s vaguely winter. The next it’s not. You look at your kitchen window and something is suddenly blooming in a dusty, long-dormant flower pot.

“Pansies,” the teenager tells you as you finger the tender new greenery. “Did you know that if someone sends them, it means, ‘I’m thinking of you?’ ”

Where she gets this intelligence also is elusive. One minute, it seems, she is just an extremely tall version of a little kid, peering crankily into the refrigerator. The next, she is someone you only thought you knew.

“Pansies,” you reply absently. Through the kitchen curtains, life on the other side of the flowers seems at once a kind of pageant, and at the same time, surreal. The kid down the block zooms by on roller-blades, hanging on to the leash of a big black dog. The lady across the street opens her front door, picks up her mail. The light lands on the ivy in a patchwork pattern, the way it did on a certain spring day many years ago.

There is the fragrance of orange blossom, and you hear yourself saying, “Do you have a lot of homework?” And her reply is absent, lost in a feeling you only think you know.

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Do you mind if I go on today about spring fever, now that that soggy little dickens, El Nino, has supposedly gone? I know it’s Monday, time to get on with things, get busy. But the air is so wonderfully hazy with that ticklish feeling of changes to come.

Maybe you feel it, too. Maybe today on the freeway, you’ll end up in the slow lane and your eye will catch on a splash of wildflowers next to a gritty overpass. Or you’ll step outside on your lunch hour, and the downtown air will have a whiff of the ocean. Or you’ll look out your kitchen window and find yourself face to face with a hummingbird.

Or maybe spring will come to you through your heartstrings, the way it seems to have with a woman I know. Though she is happily married, she confides that she finds herself thinking of old romances, of beautiful boys she loved long ago. I know the feeling. It’s not about the boys, exactly, but more about a memory of being totally free, of hovering like a hummingbird in the sunshine, suspended between phases of life and time. It comes and goes, dappled, inchoate, like the shadows on the ivy. Like the mood that is sometimes the teenager’s, sometimes mine.

“I don’t need a ride home from school today,” she announces. There is a long pause while she waits for you to ask why.

“Why?” you finally say.

“Because I’m riding home with someone.”

“Who?”

“Oh, just a guy.”

She closes the refrigerator door, rises up on her toes and skips (!) in the direction of the phone. She’s smiling a strange, kooky smile, like the smiles on the faces of those people who ate the applesauce and hopped that comet last year, with no explanation but that it was time to go home.

“Uh, what’s with the skipping?”

“Oh, nothing. I’m just happy.”

You consider this, wondering which is more annoying: a cranky teenager or a skipping, “just happy” one. Then you put it out of your mind because you’ve just noticed how extraordinary the roses are this year, pink and scarlet and creamy yellow in the April sun.

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The other day, one of those days when it got so hot, we went for a walk at sundown, my husband and I. The supper dishes were still dirty, the little ones needed their bath. No matter. We put the teenager in charge and set out under the twilit sky.

For the first time in what felt like forever, you could hear the crickets, cheeping in the tender lawns. In the houses, you could see the neighbors--the schoolteacher next door, the widower across the street who found a new love last winter--clicking their yellow porch lights on.

My, but it was peaceful. We had taken cups of tea, and we walked, sipping, under the canopy of stars. We’ve been married too long, now, for that lovers’ standby, “What are you thinking?” But, if he had asked, I’d have replied:

I’m thinking of a certain spring night, years ago. I’m thinking of crickets at twilight in the gathering dew. I’m thinking that, this year, we should put in some pansies, though, with or without them, my heart, as always, dear, will be thinking of you.

Shawn Hubler’s column appears on Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.