Sprung

A friend and I just came back from a few hours outside on this, the first truly glorious day of spring here. We went down to Elmwood Avenue, the commercial district which has a fun, hipsterish vibe. It’s like Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Boutiques and jewelry stores and galleries and restaurants and bars and residences and apartment buildings and churches line the street from Delaware Park south to the downtown area. The part of the avenue that one could consider “Elmwood” in this Jane Jacobs-sense is about two miles long and fairly flat. While it’s possible to walk from one end of the entire commercial district to the other, it would probably become tiring, and you would have to walk or bus back, and I haven’t taken a ride on the bus here yet. Along that two-mile length, there are about four or five smaller strips of development, and Spot Coffee forms the urban cornerstone of only one of them. The clientele is younger rather than older, but you do see the random pair of seniors or actual grownups. It hasn’t been taken over by the McLaren stroller crowd the way Seventh Avenue has.

Then we went to Delaware Park and walked around a little bit. My friend is in a rather advanced stage of kidney failure, and has to go for dialysis every other day, so he doesn’t do a lot of walking. But he said the sunshine and fresh air and the brief stroll we took did him good. It did both of us good. The change from winter to spring here this last week has been something to see—palpable and tangible. There are purple crocuses sprouting in the front yard, and the very last bits of snow are the ones in the shadiest corners. The lawn feels like wet springboard, and there was a lot of moss underneath all that snow. I’d like to get busy in the yard right away, but hopefully we’ll have a long spring and summer to do things like finish the deck, paint the door and the breezeway, figure out what to do with the yard.

I find myself wondering what it means to be closing in on my first year here. It is rather incredible that it’s still been only ten-and-a-half months. My life here remains rich and full and busy, and for that I’m deeply grateful. I wonder if it means that I will be staying on here. I don’t think I can figure that out just yet; I don’t think I can even begin to approach it. The timing feels premature. I’m not in my twenties or even my thirties, yet I’ve successfully transitioned into a completely different line of work, one that I could see myself doing for years to come. The kind of work I do for my brother’s studio utilizes all of my skills, and I continue to find it one of the most fulfilling things I’ve ever done in my life. If I were to continue on in the long term, I’d expect certain things from the work like benefits and set hours and such. And I wouldn’t want to be living with my brother while I was working for him. But I’m also at peace because I feel that many of these questions remain to be answered; in fact, most of them remain to be asked. They lie somewhere on the horizon, still out of sight, like summer. Why rush them? It’s only finally become spring.