NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY

I have been loving the advent of this current springtime more than any other I can remember. We didn't make it back to Indiana until mid-April last year and so we had already missed the first blossoms when they are at their brightest and hardiest. And of course we didn't experienced last spring as the far side of a cold and dreary Indiana winter - and that makes a difference in appreciation levels for sure.

And maybe I'm just a bit more melancholy than past years, but this spring has inspired in me just as much sadness as awe. Maybe it's because I'm getting older and the kids are leaving the nest and I am unexpectedly in the midst of reevaluating my career trajectory while in my 50s. 

I guess things are feeling so ... temporary.

To top it all off, recently (some of) my 8th graders have been reading The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton and she has the narrator at one point recite a famous Robert Frost poem he learned in school.

And it is a sad little poem:

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature's first green is gold, 

Her hardest hue to hold. 

Her early leaf's a flower; 

But only so an hour. 

Then leaf subsides to leaf. 

So Eden sank to grief, 

So dawn goes down to day. 

Nothing gold can stay. 

Sad, but true.

As a way of illustrating the veracity of Frost's claim that "nothing gold can stay", compare these two pictures of the blooms on the cherry tree Melissa and I planted in our front yard many years ago now.

Here's the first:

And the second is just four days later:

And here are a few of this spring's first leaves - looking like a flower, up against a few leaves leftover from last season on a bush in the backyard:

No doubt about it, Frost is right: nothing gold can stay.

That's where Frost leaves it, anyway, but I have to remind myself that "Eden sank to grief" is not where the story ends ...