It has been hard to enjoy spring this year. Covid is still with us. The brutal attack on Ukraine brings a sense of sadness and horror dampening thoughts for world harmony. Pictures of families torn apart are heartbreaking. Seeing towns with buildings destroyed is hideous. This is such a waste. Do I still hope for the promise of spring?

This year my azaleas reflect how I feel. They started out with plenteous and beautiful buds. They were ready and expecting to burst forth full of energy and hope. Then, a late frost came and most of the buds were killed. Amazingly, some survived—perhaps because they were not big enough to freeze.

My bushes look like this—mostly brown with dead buds. However, mixed in with the brown, dead buds are ones that survived and opened. The are beautiful as if nothing has happened . . . ignoring the death around them.

That reflects my mood this year. I am ready for the promise of spring. Ready for hope — for rebirth. Ready for wars to be over . . . better yet, to never be begun.

I am reminded that in the midst of sorrow and death there is invariably rebirth and hope. Rebirth may not always look like how I think it should look or how I want it to look. Still, it is there . . .

I heard a story the other day on NPR about a family in Ukraine. A mother and two daughters left their town and were in Lviv to try to get out of the country. Just months ago the daughters (seven and eleven) had been ballerinas in The Nutcracker ballet. The mother is a teacher at the Kharkiv ballet school. The mother says this about Kharkiv, “It’s a very beautiful city, but now it’s broken, day after day more. It’s very painful for me, you know.” “All my dreams about my children, because they are small ballerinas, they are broken.”

Now, leaving their father behind to defend their country, they were alone trying to get to France where relatives live and they could be safe. The interviewer found the mother and daughters walking through a park with only a bright pink suitcase for the trip. 

The images were vivid as the interviewer described them. The eleven-year-old gave a little taste of her dance. She gracefully executed a ballet position. I felt sad for them, for their ballerina friends, for the city they were leaving, and for the country they were forced to leave for now.

The descriptions of the family with the pink suitcase brought a smile to my face. The interviewer ended saying, “And then (they) set off again, a mother and her two little ballerinas, pulling their pink suitcase through the park.”

Even though I may not have felt like this was a normal spring, I went out and took pictures of some of my favorite flowers in my yard. They are small reminders. They always show up and return every year to replace the brown dead winter leaves with their yellows, purples and whites.

Do I believe in the promise of spring? Yes, of course, I believe—even this year.