A child’s first spring

Experience cannot be repeated

There are times, if only for a moment, when the planes of life align and perfection is reached.

A warm spring day, the wafting scent of flowers on a gentle breeze, cherry blossoms, the delight of a child who doesn’t remember his last spring.

He was intoxicated by the flowers. Last year he was two and hadn’t yet developed the awareness to understand the world’s rebirth after the pall of winter. So this was, in a sense, his first spring.

Watching his joy as he embraced this new world, I tried to understand what it felt like. And perhaps while spinning with him under the cherry trees I recaptured a fragment. My smile might have been as brilliant as his when we sat in the daffodils. But when he looked down at the flower strewn grass, the sun touched his round cheek and the ends of his beautiful lashes, and my heart broke. Because it was his first spring, and he could never have that again.

Do you get that? Nostalgia for what you’re in the midst of enjoying? If the cherry blossoms were forever they would lose their bite. Perhaps my sorrow was for him, and the loss he couldn’t yet understand. Perhaps it was for myself and knowing I would lose him, as every parent must.

Those are the moments to live for, when the planes of life align, and joy reaches its peak. It would be nice, just once, to forget about time. To stop the thought (even if it is just a flicker in the back of my brain) that this, too, will not last.