Everyone talks about spring like it's a promise kept. Like the world owes you warmth after February and you've got the receipt somewhere to prove it. But spring doesn't come clean. It comes rough, half-dressed, smelling of mud and last year's leaves, and you love it anyway — maybe because you need to. Maybe because the alternative is staying in February forever.
Donelaitis wrote about spring in Lithuania three centuries ago and somehow the texture is the same. The first signs aren't pretty — frozen ground cracking, birds arriving confused, peasants dragging themselves back to the fields while their bodies still remember how to be still. Joy and obligation arriving together, as they usually do. You're glad it's warmer. You also now have to do things again.
There's a specific kind of spring feeling that nobody has named properly. It happens somewhere between March and April, usually on a Tuesday, when the sun is actually warm on your face for the first time — not just bright, but warm — and you stop walking for a second. You just stop. And something in your chest that's been clenched since October loosens, slightly, without permission.
That moment doesn't last. By the time you've clocked it, it's already a memory. The bus is coming, or your phone buzzes, or you're just cold again because the wind came back. But you had it. That moment happened. Spring gave you that.
In the old poem, spring is a moral event. The seasons have ethics — summer rewards hard work, winter punishes laziness, spring gives you a fresh sheet to write on. Whether you deserve it or not is beside the point. The earth doesn't run a credit check.
That's still true. Spring arrives for everyone — the organised and the chaotic, the ones who made plans in January and the ones who just survived the dark. The daffodils come up the same regardless. That's either comforting or unfair depending on the day.
The real joy of spring, if we're being honest, is permission. Permission to want things again. To make plans that feel more like hope than delusion. To open a window. To think: maybe this one will be different — and mean it, even though you've thought it before, even though you know how the year goes.
That's the gift. Not the warmth itself, but the wanting. The way the light coming through the curtains at 7am lands on the floor like it's trying to tell you something. The way even a grey spring day has a different quality of grey — lighter, somehow. Moving.
Spring joys. Make of them what you will.