By: Gilbert Pilayre
AT THE DOOR OF SPRING
Winter is finally wrapping up. While the sun shines brightly, the temperature though still demands a jacket for our morning stroll. Floki doesn’t need one. His thick curly white fur is enough. We ventured to the outskirts, wandering through the same vineyards and wine taverns that usually teem with life during the summer months.
It’s a passionate insurgency, a riot of the roots. Spring arrives like a woman with her hair full of wheat and her hands stained with the juice of the earth.
The trees, which were skeletons yesterday, are now dressing themselves in the silk of the hidden.
The light does not just shine; it ‘touches’ the skin of the grapes in the Viennese hills.
Every bud is a small, clenched fist that finally opens to tell the truth. Even the most ‘wretched’ weed in the sidewalk crack is a thunderous declaration that the cycle of life cannot be jailed. Spring is the return of the ‘nobodies’—the seeds that were buried and forgotten, now rising to reclaim the kingdom of the sun.
There is violence as small ponds are formed by melted snow. It is a season of labor and boundaries.
The tragedy of spring is that it is so young, and yet it is already hurrying toward the middle-age of summer. It promises us eternal youth while the portrait of the earth beneath the soil grows older and more wrinkled everyday. For the world to be sweet again, something bitter must have happened in winter. The flowers are the residue of the struggle we chose to forget. Spring is but a reconnection to the Divine, waking the senses from the unlife of mechanical existence.
We were buried by the winter like a kind of dictatorship of the frost. Despite the blossoms’ defiance, weeds emerged from sidewalk cracks, reaching for sunlight. It tried to bury our memories of the sun. The vineyards are a map of human labor. The grapes do not grow because of nature alone. They grow because of the worker’s calloused hands.
So, we walk, Floki and I, through this green insurrection. We see that the frost was a lie told by a season that thought it was eternal. But let us not forget: the soil is dark because it is filled with the shadows of those who did not live to see the thaw. Their silence is the fertilizer for this loud, bright bloom. It is a bittersweet victory, this spring—a joy that carries the weight of the winter in its roots. The grapes will eventually hang heavy, sweet with the memory of the cold, and when we finally drink the wine of justice, it will taste of the earth, the salt of tears, and the stubborn, beautiful persistence of the ‘nobodies’ who refused to stay buried.
