If this season could have a personality, it would be moody.
Pleasantly sunny one day.
Blustery the next.
You never know what you’re going to get.
As a Floridian, I feel guilty about my visceral response to our mercurial weather.
How dare the temperature dip into the 30s on the cusp of spring?
I’m tired of winter, yet, wince at the thought of a New Englander in freezing temperatures hearing of my thin-skinned whining.
Still, I long for warmer days . . . ;. more so than ever before.
This is like life in America right now.
We are uncertain what each day will bring.
Talk about mercurial.
Our economy has more ups and downs than the Six Flags over Georgia Scream Machine that shaped my childhood experience with roller coasters and not in a good way.
As a nation, we are economically and emotionally raw.
I see this not only in myself, but in others.
Friends aren’t talking about the kids’ summer vacations.
Rather, they’re registering themselves for summer school to beef up their resume.
Or downsizing their homes.
Or upsizing their wallet by taking a second job. Up. Down. Up. The conversation has shifted like the March winds.
I wonder – are we on the cusp of something better or brutal?
My late father, a man with an ear for poetry and scripture, loved to quote Ecclesiastes, usually at the dinner table. I can’t remember my children’s Social Security numbers and please don’t ask me to recite my license tag number, but I can quote verbatim Ecclesiastes Chapter 3: Verses 1 – 10. “There is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every event under heaven . . .”
Dad was a product of The Great Depression with parents who came penniless to Florida. He lived in poverty, but had youthful dreams. He gave up a University of Florida track scholarship when the U.S. Navy came calling his first semester in college for World War II. He came home, married his high school sweetheart, became a builder and raised a family. He experienced the highs and lows of building construction, often finding himself on the wrong side of an empty spec house. He had money both in banks and under an undisclosed floorboard of every house in which he ever lived.
Maybe that’s why Ecclesiastes resonated with him.
“A time to plant and a time to uproot what is planted . . .”
Thinking of Dad makes me feel guilty for whining over something as silly as the weather, and even as serious as the economy. It doesn’t help.
“Chin up, Honey,” Dad would say before breaking into “Try a Little Tenderness” because the man loved a good song almost as much as poetry and scripture.
We are living in hard, uncertain times. We yearn for better days. Yes, we are raw, but I sense that, in many ways, we’ve become more real.
Perhaps this is a time to plant something new. A time to create a season unlike one we’ve seen before. Warm, real and tender.
