Excerpted from The Book of Gathered Stillness and based on a true story.

The back door sticks the way it always does after a wet winter, swelling just enough to make me have to pull a little harder. Outside, the air has that cool, rinsed feeling, as if someone ran a damp cloth over the neighborhood overnight. The sun is bright but not warm. It catches on the thin glaze of ice here and there and turns it into a pale, yellow line, like chalk dust. Somewhere in the yard, something is dripping—probably the downspout still emptying yesterday’s last effort at snow, the kind that arrives late and apologetic and still manages to make a mess. I stand on the threshold longer than I need to, one hand on the door, and take inventory without meaning to. The yard is half winter – gray, flattened, reluctant – and half a sketch of what it will become.  I might be able to just make out a bud…but then, again, maybe not.

The grass, where it isn’t matted, is trying on green in uneven patches. This is the moment every year when I start making lists. Not the good, rational lists that live on my phone, but the old-fashioned kind that appear in my head while I’m brushing my teeth or reaching for a mug. Install the cameras.  Make a plan to clean the windows. Install the water purifier. Replace the fan switch in the bathroom with one of those automatic humidistat switches. Rearrange the garage for when the new service door is finished.

Winter has a way of making my world smaller. It turns me into a person who is proud of keeping the heat at a reasonable number and remembers, with grim satisfaction, that I bought salt before the first storm. My ambitions narrow to the length of the driveway. I become intimate with surfaces: the kitchen counter, the hallway rug. There is a particular stillness to it—not just outside, but in me. Even my attention feels heavy, like a coat that has absorbed too much damp. Then spring arrives, not all at once, but with these quickenings: the first morning I can open a window without regretting it and smelling the hint of freshness in the air; seeing the first tiny shoots of the crocuses. The light changes its angle. It gets nosier, nosing into corners it ignored all winter. It points out the smudges on the wall and a clump of dust in the corner. It makes the dust on the bookshelves look like a personal failing, better able to catch it now that it has a higher angle in the sky. On a day like this—the kind that can’t quite decide if it wants to be March or April—I find myself walking the house the way you walk a room before guests arrive. Not frantic, not exactly. Just attentive in a way that feels new. There’s an energy that comes with being able to do things again, the simple physical permission of not having to plan your movements around cold. You can kneel on the porch and adjust landscaping rocks without your fingers going numb. You can stand in the garage with the door open and not feel like you’re being punished.

If I begin with the big projects, I’ll get that familiar surge of optimism that burns hot and fast and leaves behind a little pile of self-reproach. A small task is honest. It has edges. It ends. I might do something simple at first.   Check the hose bibs to be sure they haven’t frozen, even though I’d drained them last year.  That’s one of spring’s tricks: it makes minor repairs feel like declarations. In winter, maintenance is survival. In spring, it becomes possible. Even picking up some debris that blew into the yard during a particularly strong winter wind feels like clearing your throat after a long silence. Of course, it isn’t just the house. The body has its own seasons, and mine is not subtle about them. In winter, I wake up with joints that negotiate rather than cooperate; or, at least, cooperate after some discussion. I move carefully until oatmeal and warmth do their quiet work. When the days begin to stretch, my body seems to remember it was built to bend. I’ll catch myself standing up straighter while I’m washing dishes, as if someone has adjusted the strings from above. I am not young, but I am also not done. Not even close.

Spring persuades me of this without saying it out loud. Still, even in this clean, bright air, there’s a note of foreboding that I can’t quite shake. I live in a place where summer doesn’t arrive politely; it shoulders its way in and sits down hard. By July, the same sun that now feels like a friendly hand on the back of my neck will be an insisting presence. The air will thicken. The house will hold heat the way a cast-iron pan holds it, long after the burner is off. There is a particular kind of fatigue that comes with heat, a slow draining of ambition. It’s not the dramatic exhaustion of hardship; it’s pettier than that, which makes it harder to admit. You come home from errands, or simply from taking a walk in the neighborhood, and the idea of picking up a paintbrush or a caulk gun feels absurd. Even the bugs seem to move with a purpose you can’t match. And because I know this, spring has a compressed sweetness. It’s not only that I want to do things. I want to do them now, before the days become a test.

The urgency is not heroic. It’s practical and a little anxious. I think about this as I drag the extension cord across the patio, careful not to snag it on the chair legs. The cord is stiff from months of being coiled in the cold, and it fights me like an old opinion. I step out into the yard, and the sun warms the back of my jacket. A breeze comes and goes. In the distance, a car door closes. Someone’s dog barks and then, as if remembering it isn’t important, stops. This is what I love about this season: the way the world is active without being frantic. In summer, everything shouts. In winter, everything mutters. Spring speaks in a voice you can actually listen to. There’s also, if I’m honest, a deeper hunger that rides in on these first good days. It’s not just for a freshly cut lawn or seeing real growth on the trees we planted last year. It’s for the feeling of being in forward motion. Winter’s stillness can start to feel like a verdict. The days are short, the errands are limited, and you start telling yourself stories about your own limitations. You think, “This is just how it is now.” You lower your expectations the way you lower the thermostat. Then you open the door on a morning like this, and the air is cool and bright and full of small noises, and the story gets interrupted.  You realize that particular story might not yet be true.  Perhaps in a later chapter, but not now…not yet.

I don’t want to romanticize it. Spring doesn’t fix your life. The same bills come in the mail. The same awkward conversations wait for you. The same old anxieties find you while you’re standing at the sink. But there is something quietly corrective in being reminded that change can be ordinary. It doesn’t always arrive with a speech. Sometimes it arrives as a patch of green where yesterday there was only mud. A project around the house is, in its own small way, an agreement with the future. You caulk some of the edges of that shed you built because you believe you’ll still be here to do the bigger job of painting the sides that seem like they need a second coat. You plant another tree or two because you imagine yourself standing at the counter later, watering it over time, pretending you’re the kind of person who does that regularly. You fix the squeaky garage door wheels not because they matter in some grand sense, but because you’re tired of living with an avoidable annoyance. There’s dignity in that. Not the glossy kind, but the kind that shows up in clean edges and tightened screws. And yet, the foreboding remains. I can already picture August: the lawn turning brittle at the edges, the nights that don’t cool down, the way the air conditioner’s hum, quiet as it is, becomes the house’s constant background thought. The way you start avoiding the upstairs in the afternoon. The way even good plans get softened by heat until they sag. Maybe that’s why spring makes me so eager. It’s the season that offers effort without punishment. It lets you believe that you can do more. There’s a dry humor in this, if you look at it from a certain angle.

Every year, I act as if I’ve never met summer before, as if its arrival will be a surprise, as if I won’t once again stand in the kitchen in late July, thinking about the half-finished project in the garage, wondering, “Who convinced me I was going to do that during the hottest month of the year?” The answer, of course, is Spring. Spring is an excellent liar. It makes even my overconfidence feel wholesome. By midday, the breeze drops, and the sun begins to show its other face. Not cruel, exactly, but more insistent. I take off my jacket and drape it on the patio table. My shirt sticks a little to my back. Inside, the kitchen is cool, shadowed. The floor under my feet feels solid and a little cold through my socks. I drink a glass of water standing at the counter, and the silence in the house is deep in a way it won’t be later, when windows are open, and the world feels just a little louder because you’re now letting it in.

On the counter, there’s a small pile of things I’ve taken out of the “inside toolbox.”  Bits and pieces that were on top of the thing I needed.  They look like evidence. Not of transformation, just of progress.  Leftovers from something completed.

Through the window above the sink, I can see that the Cryptomeria on this side of the house, which had taken on a rust color over the winter, now seems to be more green.  Still a bit rusty but brightening with the sun and coming warmth. The sunlight makes the glass slightly warm where it touches the frame, and when I rest my fingertips there, I can feel the day moving forward. I know summer will come. I know I will complain about it, and then, in October, I will miss it in a selective way, remembering the long, comfortable evenings but forgetting the sticky nights. Seasons train you in amnesia. They also train you in acceptance, if you let them. For now, though, there is this one colder morning feel lingering in the air, even as the sun climbs. The house is still holding onto winter in its corners, but it’s loosening its grip.

So am I. I pick up a small bag of screws and turn it over in my hand. They might come in handy someday.   Saved hardware has in the past.  Maybe not, but I will still save it and set it down beside the tape and the hook and loop strips, not as a promise, exactly, but as a marker. Outside, the drip from the downspout has slowed. The day is still cool enough to work in, and warm enough to want to. I don’t need the whole year to feel manageable. I just need this: the door opening, the air that doesn’t bite, the small tasks lining up like a path I can actually walk. And the knowledge, sitting quietly in the background, that I should use this gentler weather while it’s here, because everything is temporary, including my motivation.

Carlise, Spring 2026