‘Springs’ by Angela Townsend

The magnolias will wait for you. People tell you otherwise, but they are wrong. People are afraid, and afraid is where all the half-truths huddle together.

I’m a huddler, so I understand. I have spent years trying to get warm. Urgency has a chimney, which hints of a fireplace. But urgency never lets me in past the foyer, so I cannot know for sure. I can only hear carols from the next room. They sound like a lecture, lyrics with no music. They are warning each other that you must make the most of moments and magnolias. Do it now. Beauty has not signed a contract with you. Tomorrow may be too late.

I am telling you, the magnolias will wait. You can trust me, for I have tested the system. I spent a full spring wintering.

We notarised the papers three days after the equinox. Divorce is supposed to snuff you to embers, but my hearth crackled. My new old name was gingerbread in my mouth. My wardrobes smelled like evergreens. It was the outer envelope of April, but I felt like writing Christmas cards.

Spring was once my season. I went on first dates with myself. I took thirty pictures of the same begonia outside the supermarket, unconcerned by the cart boy’s concern. I gathered dandelions and wore a crown to church. I negotiated metaphysics with squirrels. I gave no thought to whether my pinks matched. I put my hand on bark until I heard rhythms.

I was married on the back flap of June. I gave him my name, and he told me I was naked. He applied pesticide to my exclamation marks so the neighbours wouldn’t talk. He informed me that people who wear pink are desperate to be noticed. He was beside himself when I took pictures of other people’s gladiolas. I was not beside him the day a housedressed woman sprinted out to thank me.

‘Thank you!’

There it was. I was naked after all, and magenta. ‘For what?’

Her hair was a thousand commas, smiles curled so tight that their eyes disappeared. ‘You stopped for my happy chappies!’

If you do not stoop over strangers’ gardens, you will never hear the words ‘happy’ and ‘chappie’ high five one another. If you are not ashamed, you will learn that gaudy blossoms have names like Vaudeville performers, and women in housedresses intend to stop time, one neighbour at a time.

Spring chaperoned my name, but it left no instructions. There was no Performance Improvement Plan from the dogwoods. The sparrows did not convene an emergency session to discuss my delinquency. The magnolias had not placed me on probation.

Everything exhaled permission, so I spent that single spring indoors.

There are springs in the chorus, and springs when you must commune with yourself. I did not feel guilty, an exotic giddiness unto itself. I was not afraid of what I might be missing. I was cosy. I was home. It was no less of a spring.

Victory’s wardrobe includes a cocoon. People warn you otherwise, but they are wrong. No chrysalis is a mere means to an end. Stop, and you will see. Every pupa’s jacket is studded with rhinestones. The creature inside is as gooey as baby food, unformed and unashamed. Its safehouse is spangled. It is as unnecessary as hazel eyes and double rainbows. The divine is showing off. People tell you otherwise because they are afraid.

I spent April in sweatshirts and solitude. It was my season. There was terrible prose to write, thousands of words wild as mares. There were forgotten man-hats and greasy anniversary cards to jab into the fireplace. I filled contractor bags with pyjamas he’d liked but kept the brooches he didn’t. I assembled ancestors around my candles and interrogated T.S. Eliot about this ‘April is the cruellest month’ business. My mother brought me a Christmas tree to keep up all year. It was necessary.

The magnolias turned glorious for their own pleasure. If you live long enough to be honest, an audience is irrelevant.

When the next spring’s envelope arrived, I used my wings as letter openers. I wore a zirconia four-leaf-clover on my jean jacket. I pressed daisies for my Christmas tree. I took my last name on first dates. I knelt in the mud to collect stones, which is to say I prayed.

I started to apologise to a magnolia, but her laugh was so raucous, she got the neighbours’ attention. I stopped. I made a flower crown and hung it on urgency’s doorknob. I was not late.

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Angela Townsend (she/her) is the Development Director at Tabby’s Place: a Cat Sanctuary. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Chautauqua, CutBank, Lake Effect, New World Writing Quarterly, Paris Lit Up, The Penn Review, Pleiades, The Razor, and Terrain.org, among others. Angie has lived with Type 1 diabetes for 33 years, laughs with her poet mother every morning, and loves life affectionately.