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Our tulips (I know, we planted them) and our peonies (I think, we inherited them) are coming up.

Daffodils and a bunch of unknown plants and flowers are coming in too.

It’s our first spring in our new house. And it feels like quite a spring. Partly because it’s unseasonably warm already. But when you don’t have a yard, like in our old condo, or much of a view of nature at all, like in our old student apartments, you don’t sense as much of a connection between the season and the place you live.

I grew up in a house like the one we own now (certainly not one of these) but haven’t lived in one since college. I’m doing the same tasks, cooking the same holiday dishes, remembering things I’d forgotten in that interlude. It’s interesting how much of adulthood can be living your childhood from the opposite vantage point: as if that teens/20s process of “becoming an adult” is just a brief sojourn between two kinds of childhood.

Owning a house is a big deal, and it’s a workload on top of everything else. There’s simply no guarantee that your storm door won’t come loose or that bringing your fireplace up to code won’t be a big, expensive job. It’s almost insane that houses are bought and sold the way they are, when you think about. But I enjoy the workload.

And I enjoy the kinds of leisure it permits. Cilantro and asparagus will be coming up, if all goes well. My new barbecue grill and lawnmower are in the garage, waiting to be assembled. (That is, waiting for me to assemble them.) I went with an electric lawnmower, but I almost bought a mechanical push mower. The temptation when you have a lot of nice interior space is to withdraw into it, and I want to resist that.

We had our first Christmas here in the new house; now we’re having our first Easter. Lots of “firsts.” I can vaguely remember that feeling of “first” in each place I’ve lived; first snowstorm in college, first fancy dinner in a tiny student-apartment kitchen. It gets your brain out of old patterns; it enlarges your world. As an old General Motors commercial went, “all new, all over again.”

Happy Easter and happy Passover! And thank you for reading!

Related Reading:

The Glory of Tomato Paste

Growing Up

Getting Good at Doing Things Wrong

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