Spring, Interrupted

Our town has a weekly outdoor market for locals to buy fruits and vegetables. Every Friday morning, trucks full of fresh produce back into an empty parking lot and vendors begin unpacking their inventory. Once set up, there are sections for endless fruits and veggies but also areas for spices, nuts, cheese, butter, eggs, and olives, and a place for clothing and household items that spills out onto the surrounding streets. At the busiest of times, shopping at the bazaar is loud, crowded, and chaotic. It’s not unusual to hear an amusing “HEY-LADY-HEY-LADY-HEY-LADY” shouted from the vendors trying to entice buyers with their products for a good price.

This past year, in an effort to keep Esther and me safe and healthy, I’ve stayed home from shopping at the bazaar. Instead, Afshin goes, carrying with him a collaborative grocery list written in both English and Farsi.

He comes into the kitchen armed with bags of tomatoes, cucumbers, red peppers, and apples, and hands me a coffee. Fridays are also the last day we can be out of the house until Monday because Turkey is back under weekend lockdowns. To help quell the sting of the approaching lockdown, he’s gotten into the habit of swinging by Starbucks each week after grocery shopping—a custom I am 100% okay with.

I start putting away the produce and rinse some of the herbs in the sink. Afshin begins making a Persian omelet for an early lunch with eggs from our neighbor’s chickens. The omelet is more like scrambled eggs but made with tomato sauce and cumin and served with crusty flatbread from the neighborhood bakery.

Lest anyone thinks we live in a Martha Stewart catalog, the strange neighbor out our kitchen window is once again setting small fires to unidentifiable piles of trash around his driveway. Why he periodically does this? No one knows. And a mangy street dog is sniffing around the perimeters of our building, hoping in vain that Afshin will throw down a bone or two from last night’s dinner. Esther is asleep across the hallway, so we’re putting the food away in silence, moving slowly, and sending a dirty look when the other makes too loud of a noise. Quaint and rustic it is not always.

I give the herbs a final shake in the sink and place them in empty pickle jars filled with water. Stirring the sizzling eggs with a fork over the stove, Afshin says a snowstorm is on its way and will hit this weekend. I glance outside while rotating the jars so the old, worn-off labels face the window, trying to make the parsley and dill look like intentional bouquets of greenery. The neighbor has gone back inside, leaving behind small blackened piles of mysterious ash along the pavement.

Pink blossoms bloom on the branches of a spindly tree that had somehow made its way out of the dirt ridge in front of our home. No one specifically planted the tree at the location—a mound of sandy dirt fortifying the neighbor’s wall. But deep in the dirt the seeds germinated anyway and the roots grew.

It’s well into spring. The flowers are blooming. The temps are rising. The mourning dove in the evergreen laments. And now the snow is coming.

April showers bring May flowers, but what do April snowstorms bring?

•••

Three years ago, Afshin decided to grow out his hair. I thought he was joking when he said he always wanted a ponytail but soon realized how committed he was to the growing out process. Ever a supportive spouse, I taught him how to use a hair tie (a skill I thought was innate in all of us but, boy, was I wrong), put his hair in a messy bun, and even how to french braid. But what started as a bucket list kind of thing—seeing how long his hair could grow—took on a deeper meaning.

In what I assume was a nod to the Old Testament, growing out his hair was a vow of some sort. And that once a visa was in hand, once God allowed the doors to open, once he could leave, only then would he shave his head.

Hair is a powerful thing. It’s something only the person it’s attached to can control—choosing how and when and why to cut or not to cut. This feels especially important now when the comfort of certainty and choice has been taken away. To be able to cut it once we were in the U.S. represented a dream, something for a time to come. It became a symbol of stepping out in faith, trusting that better things were ahead.

But the hair got heavy and too much to maintain. Showers took too long. And then there were the strands left all around the house. More than that though, the months rolled on and there was no visa or updates on our case. Emails to congresspeople and video calls with lawyers led to more dead ends. So, in a Samson-esque fashion, we buzzed off the long hair together.

***

I don’t know if it’s because I’m a mother now, but the impending snowstorm had me worried about the fragile pink blossoms on the trees, especially on that skinny tree growing out of the dirt hill. Will someone protect them? How will farmers fair with the late spring frost? Are they concerned, too?

This is maybe a little embarrassing to admit, but I spent nap time researching what happens to fruit trees when an unexpected freeze comes in the springtime. Hey, we were under a weekend lockdown and didn’t have much else going on. And did I mention I was worried about those tiny, baby blossoms?

So as the snow fell over the weekend, juxtaposing the fresh, green grass and the chirping of songbirds, I learned about spring freezes. The untimely dip in temperatures can kill the blossoms, much to my dismay, affecting fruit production.

I thought about the apricot trees growing on the side of our building and the cherry trees in the yard behind us and the retired couple who spends hours outside tending to their garden. The snow blew sideways Saturday and Sunday and the flakes gathered on the ends of tree branches. And I wondered if the blossoms would survive or if they’d die before they ever got a chance to produce fruit.

***

The same weekend we buzzed his hair, Esther began trying to pull herself up on the coffee table and the couch. Much to our excitement, our little potato (who’s rolled over exactly three times in her life) was finally becoming interested in exploring her surroundings.

Time staggered forward as she turned 10 months, soon to be a year—a whole year of her life in Turkey, still an ocean away from grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins she’s never met. Life was growing here, but our dreams were dying. The hope of living together with our family felt like it was slipping further and further away.

We’ve had to bury a lot of dreams over the past several years. Some were big and some small, but losses nonetheless. For us, the last four years of our marriage are not how we imagined. It’s not how we would have written the story. We’ve had to get used to living in the infinite present. Today, then today, then today, never flipping the calendar to tomorrow.

We didn’t ask for this. We didn’t imagine it to be like this.

These strange days filled with uncertainty seem to echo the same sentiments of the unseasonably cold weather. Like a dam bursting, the sky broke open months after winter announced its goodbye, disrupting the order of things, tipping the balance. Winter screamed when spring should have been there breathing a steady sigh of relief.

Maybe that’s why I was so fixated on the blossoms surviving the spring freeze. Here was something beautiful growing, bringing forth the promise of fruit, of sustenance, of sunny days and life. Hope was blooming—until temperatures dipped below freezing until large flakes of snow blew sideways.

***

When Afshin cut his hair, it was the day before Easter, traditionally referred to as Holy Saturday on the liturgical calendar. It was the day after Christ’s death on the cross and the day before the stone rolled away and he stepped out of the tomb, alive.

I can imagine that particular day felt despairing and disorientating for Christ’s followers. Maybe it was heavy with stillness, questions, and waiting. Maybe it felt like all the hope that had been growing died right there on the cross. Maybe it felt as if life had been sucked away before it had a chance to grow.

These days feel a little like that, where there is no movement, no growth, no life. The fragility of hope has been interrupted by freezing temperatures, killing off any dream before it even has an opportunity to grow. Sometimes I wonder if losing a dream—something we never got a chance to have—stings more than if we’d had and then lost whatever it was we wanted.

But what I also learned while researching spring freezes over the weekend lockdown, is that healthy, well-established foliage can grow back. If roots are dug down deep enough, the tree has the strength to fight against the cold. It’s only a temporary setback. Once the snowstorm passes, the surviving blossoms will continue to grow and bear fruit in the coming weeks and months. Order will be restored. One needs only to wait.

On Holy Saturday, resurrection was at work and something glorious was happening, even when it was hidden. Now, we can only hope that underneath the brown mush and frozen branches, life is growing. Things are moving.

And rest assured, it’s still spring—and thank goodness for that. We need the spring.