I experienced my first Midwest spring at the age of sixteen when I, a native Californian, attended boarding school in Missouri. The experience of that season was memorable and lingers even today. 

Awed by scarlet redbud trees, bursting pink peonies, and carpets of purple violets, I remember feeling an odd restlessness, an overwhelmingly expectant sense that I now recognize as spring fever. 

We teenagers sat in overheated classrooms that spring, shedding unnecessary clothing layers, and gazed longingly out the window at landscapes painted with more colors of green than I knew possible. Everything felt laden with yearning and newness. 

It’s not that spring in Northern California was unwelcome or lacking color, it’s that the overall effect wasn’t quite the same, nor was the sweet season as hard-won. A few months of winter rain and chill simply can’t compete with the impact of snowfall, sleet, hail, and thunderstorms.

In California, while certain plants bloom in spring and the hillsides often reach Irish heights of green, the resident birds, for the most part, remain in the same territory (and sing) all year long, and much of the foliage stays the same.

In the Midwest you know Spring is close when the birds begin singing you awake. Each stage of Midwest spring holds beauty—beginning with bursts of welcome color against stark grey tree trunks, continuing with the elegant white and pink dogwoods that recall Japanese woodcuts, and for the finale…the trees and bushes are adorned with the kind of green that vibrates in the sun and calms the soul.

Back in high school I never imagined I would one day have my own Midwest landscape to tend but now I do–and here is where the two geographies connect: long ago my mother dug up some Bearded iris bulbs out of her California garden and gifted them to her dear friend Nancy who planted them in her own California garden where they bloom and thrive, even to this day.

Nancy has a gift for arranging the irises artistically in tall handmade pottery vases around her house and seeing those displays always gave me the sense that my mother was close, even though she is no longer here physically with us.

After living in California for a decade in my thirties I transplanted yet again to the Midwest and Nancy surprised me by digging up and sending me tulip bulbs from the same plants my mother had given to her all those years ago.

Now, springtime not only returns the green, but it also returns the gift of my mother’s presence and touch, in full bloom yet again no matter the locale.