This spring has been extra special because I knew it would be the last time I'd experience a New York spring, at least in the slow, everyday, near-torturous process of waiting for the first blooms to appear on the tree branches I walk beneath during my commute to work, and in the feeling of entitlement come the magic weeks of pinks and whites that follow. March and April have always been a somewhat transitional time, but before New York I'd only experienced that transition in human-imposed scheduling (mostly school quarters ending and beginning, spring breaks, my birthday)—this is the first place I've lived in that governs itself under the convention of four real seasons, and in this spring the weather turns, and it's hard not to feel glad when days get longer and warmer, winter skin thawing and defrosting under the sun as people walk the streets a little lighter and a little happier. A little bit of we-made-it, a little bit of we-deserve-it.
It's my last spring in New York. And when endings start to draw closer and become more real, an air of finality hijacks everything I do. Urgency in making sure I don't forget to do the things I love most. The one-last everythings. Forcing myself to love those things harder than I perhaps ever really did. Putting into words what those certain things feel like so I can come back to them later, later when all they have is my memory to stand on. When New York will represent, in the course of my life, an awkward but wonderful springtime when I first learned to walk, shaky legs and all, and not very well at that. It's easiest to do this in the spring, in the growing season, because today everything is new and everything is rebuilding and I race fast and far from the winter miseries that underlie how I really feel about the city. Maybe that's why this remembering is most important.
It's our last spring in New York. In one hundred days we are going to board an airplane bound for New Zealand, and we're not sure when we'll return, nor where we'll return to. The whys and hows of this I'll probably unpack in the coming weeks, but for now I'm thinking about the season and the sun-day coming alive outside my window, the grass I will sit on and the great friend I'll have coffee with, and the city that has given me, at the very least, the beginnings of different seasonal shift.