Springsong

A melody sweeps through me, playing in my mind. I sit at my desk, ignoring it, and keep working.

But it's still playing. It's a bright melody, stirring something deep within me...

I lower my head, flipping through the pages of a file. For a moment I return to my work, reading the file, seeing it, but not thinking about it.

The sun on my back is streaming through the window, singing.

That melody...

Where have I heard it before? Quite a while ago...

 

I can't concentrate. Closing the file, I stand up, not even reaching for my coat, and leave the room, the office, the cold, impersonal cube where I have worked for the past years. And for the first time, no reluctance hinders me, slowing my step, telling me to return.

I don't let it.

The melody is playing through me, in my mind, leading me out through the door and into the sunlit street. There my car sits, the cold black metal somehow seeming out of place. Loathe as I am to get into it, the song is playing and I must listen. Something in it has latched onto me and is calling me with feelings I'd left behind long ago, back in the carefree and unproductive times of my childhood.

 

The rhythm of the highway is beating a drum within me and the car follows with its low bass harmony and I can't help but hum. The further I go from the city and its towers of stone and glass, the more the melody carries me. The sun is coming through the car window, warming me more than the city ever did. The green hills are beginning to sweep by, increasingly empty of buildings.

Looking into the car next to me, I see a man staring straight ahead, keeping his eyes on the road. He looks sad inside. Doesn't he hear the music? Aren't the notes calling him, telling him he must stop soon? But he keeps on driving. He hasn't realized, or is it remembered?

I pull off of the highway to a small road, and then to a dirt path. Here the fields end, giving way to a sea of leaves, fresh and green and red and soft, waving in the morning breeze. Here is the song. The trees know it. The grass knows it. Even the dirt road knows a bit of it, and they are all part of it, singing silently but beautifully to those who know it. As I do. I see it now, and wonder how I have stayed inside this long, hiding among my files and folders and stacks of reports. None of them is as beautiful as this simple meadow in the middle of spring. What cold tile floor can rival the crisp softness of earth beneath bare feet? What plaster wall can come close to the rough bark of a tree? What folder compares to the book of experiences nature has, everywhere, in every single moment of time? As I sit down in the grass by a tree, the newly warm wind of the morning bringing me flowers, the melody inside is at last at peace and I am singing inside. I am the song and the song is spring.