The urgency at which I have been approaching the next few weeks seems vaguely like I’m a terminal patient striving to stuff a lifetime of activity into a two week grace period, the bit of time left before the agonizing end. At least, that’s how I’ve been feeling. You don’t have to have a life-ending disease to feel like this at times.
For me, it’s the way Spring sneaks up on us some years. Winter stubbornly hangs on and then all of a sudden you’re gazing at green buds on trees, dogwood and pear tree blooms falling like Japanese cherry blossoms in a Kurosawa dream, and the grass is definitely greener, all in the space of a few days, it seems. The illusion of time’s rapid advance in such a short time is punctuated and perhaps perpetuated by the occasional blasts of cold that remind you that maybe Winter’s not quite gone after all, that it’s still got you in the grip.
The next thing you know, you’re staring at a host of greenery and colour and life, slightly warmer temperatures, and the blessed sun, and you think, My God, it’ll all be gone soon! That’s where the urgency comes in, the frenzied feeling that not a single moment should be wasted. Indeed, you find yourself packing multiple activities into moments that were meant to hold only one, just because you’re a raging hellcat with Spring on your mind and a desire to see more than the pixellated text of a webpage on that bright and glorious day.
But today we hit another solid grey day. And there’s nothing more depressing than when it’s Spring and yet temperatures match the decade of the defeat of Naziism. No shorts, no sandals, no jaunts outside just for the heck of it. Not unless you’re into nature at it’s most dull. Green Spring under cold grey skies seems just gracelessly inhospitable to me, and personally, I don’t want anything to do with it. Leave it for the Balkans.
So my host of plans and dreams are given a bit of a jolt backward into the seat of a dull day. I suppose that’s the way it is, sometimes.
I started writing yesterday about the way I grew up in America, but the essay never really coalesced. It’s like that sometimes. But I didn’t want to leave the subject alone, particularly when it was supposed to counterpoint with the firsthand report about the mass grave site that was found a couple of days ago near Diwaniyah. Iraq the Model has the description, which came from a Kurdish woman who survived the brutal executions that took her family and large numbers of Kurds.
This would have been in the mid-1980′s, a time when I was busy building forts in the woods behind my house, fighting with my little brother, and riding bicycles for miles around on the back roads of rural Tidewater Virginia. I think about the very different experiences I had from so many people who have known nothing but terror and death. I was clueless of their tortured existence, and they were likewise ignorant of my own carefree life.
If there’s any truth or justice in the world, and I happen to think you can find it in small doses, scattered like medical packs in a video game, it exists to remind us that life is more than mere words, and more fragile than the petals of a rose. It is trampled and twisted and hated by men and women who have no regard for it or its keepers. They have no virtue and no conscience, and their world is marked by dark decay, fevered death that brings no relief to its victims.
For each new mass grave uncovered I am simultaneously saddened and relieved. The crimes are brought out into the light, and those little packs of justice and truth multiply a little bit more. I would trade my childhood to save those found buried by murderers and tyrants. Life is green and gold. Yet all these people knew was grey and black. Like a cold Spring where the sun rises behind clouds. It’s not how the world was intended. It’s not the way things are supposed to be.