Spring arrives in these parts on Thursday but you wouldn't know it with the furnace running at full blast even past the Ides of March, and the temperature outside today staying at a stubborn 24 degrees when it's supposedly forecast to reach 45 today (or about 10 degrees below the normal average by this time). Yes, this winter of our discontent feels eternal and even my favorite weatherman, who loves snow and cold, is now saying so when he looks at weather models forecasting a cold end to the month.
But what I like most about Spring, as I write pretty much every year on these pages, is that sense of resurrection. That no matter how cold or cruel the winter may be, the green will sprout, the birds will sing, and, on the best days, the breeze will caress us with warm promises.
On the home front, we have a dedicated Mr. Robin, who now often waits for us (on the snowy colder days) for his ration of expensive dessicated worms, and we have valiant snowdrops that have pushed up into the sun all over the yard, making pledges of spring with their delicate (yet hardy) white blooms.
March for me is a month of two important anniversaries and now I'm hoping I can add a third. I had the second heart ablation on the 14th at the Ross Heart Hospital, part of the Ohio State Medical Center, and while the experience was much more painful than the first (hard as they tried, they couldn't get my heart to replicate the crazy heartbeats that have assailed me now for seven long years), the care and the quality of the hospital was truly impressive. My new specialist is confident that he knows what's going on and that he "got it," so now we just wait and hope and pray that nothing happens. I had my huge let down last time a week after the first ablation, when the crazy heart returned, so I'm trying not to get my hopes up at all so I'm not terribly disappointed again. In any case, at least now there's someone who thinks he knows what's going on, which is an improvement from my first specialist who told my mom and my husband one thing and then couldn't remember what he'd said to them when I followed up with him. "Time to get a second opinion," I thought. And I'm glad I did.
This Wednesday it'll be 13 years since I moved to Ohio, in the wake of my husband's earlier move in February 2001 for a job that changed our lives, nonetheless because it allowed us (through his health insurance) to afford the surgery on March 25, 2002 that saved my life and has given me these subsequent 12 years of at least a Crohn's Disease-free life. Of course, other complications have ensued, like this relatively new heart problem, so when someone says lightning doesn't hit in the same place twice, I just laugh. But I'm always thankful that while these are health setbacks they are not catastrophes, and that I'm ultimately very blessed and very fortunate.
While spring break wasn't much of one (I spent the time being anxious about the second procedure and battling the return of an annoying cold that started before I arrived in Puerto Rico in February but seemingly had "cured" itself once I breathed the Caribbean air) there's less than two months to go before this semester, this entire academic year, concludes. Time does go fast, doesn't it?
Perhaps, like everything around us, I also will get some springtime-of-life this year and my heart will settle down and I will resurrect some much-longed-for tranquility into my expectations of what each day may bring. At least in my heart (perhaps ironically), hope does, like the season we look forward to after the hard finality of winter, always spring eternal.
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