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“I think this is something you need to hear. No matter what, in a few days time spring will be here. Nothing that happens can stop spring from coming.”
Then she stopped talking. I wasn’t sure where she was going with this. I wanted to ask her more but when I looked down her eyes were shut. I reached down and found that she had no pulse.
~
Beep. . . Beep. . . Beep. My heart monitor was becoming so an- noying. I was ready to get out of bed and unplug it. However, that was impossible since I was basically stuck in the bed with all the di erent wires attached to me. There were so many more things I should have been doing. I should have been coaching. I should have been out enjoying spring. I should have been outside eating ice cream with my kids. I shouldn’t have been lying here dying. The window was just close enough to my bed where I could see out of it. As I glanced outside I could see children playing in the courtyard below. They were running around, free and happy
as could be.
The wheels of the old cart rattled as the nurse rolled food down the oor. I could smell mashed po- tatoes and turkey. I could almost taste them. Of course I wasn’t allowed to eat anything. I thought of Bubba and wondered how his last softball game of the season was going. I would have done anything to have been there.
My head was throbbing. The pain
killers never seemed to work. I
watched the clock on the wall
and studied the way the hands
moved, how it ticked every time a second passed, how it kept the same pace. I almost hated it. Every time the hand moved I knew that I was a second closer to dying. I pulled the sheets up around my neck. They smelled fresh, almost like how the fresh air smells in the spring. Outside I heard a nurse talking to a young women. It sounded as if she was trying to come in to see me. Her voice sounded familiar but my head hurt so badly that I didn’t want to try and place it. After a few mo- ments she walked into the room. I couldn’t control myself. Tears started streaming down my face. My entire body was shaking. I couldn’t believe who was standing in front of me.
“Hey Mom.”
“Maggie, Maggie is that really you?”
My voice shook as I spoke. There she was, standing right
in front of me. Her red waves were out of place and her eye looked slightly black. Her lip was cut in the corner and her knee had a huge bruise on her. All these things weren’t there when she left. The one thing that was there when she left was no longer seen.
“Maggie, where is the ring?”
“It’s. . . complicated.”
“But what happened?”
“Let’s just say things didn’t work out. But that’s not the im- Spring 2015
portant thing right now. Look, I’m really sorry for what I did. It was stupid. Just plain stupid. I hate myself for wasting so much time. I could have spent that time with you. I had no clue. If I had known. . .”
“Stop right there. You had no clue I was sick. The important thing is that you’re here now.”
“I guess. I just wasted so much time. Time isn’t something you can get back.”
“Believe me, I know.”
We both sat there thinking. I thought of all the things I could have done in my life. I wished time was something I could buy back.
“Mom,” Maggie looked really serious as she began to talk, “this lady came up to me the other day at a restaurant. I was sitting there all alone and she just walked over and sat with me. She looked at me and asked me what my favorite season was. I told her that I didn’t have one. She just smiled. She
then told me that spring was her favorite season. She said she had su ered through many tragedies in her life but spring always came around. She said that the seasons were reliable and would never fail. She kept going on and talked about how everything came back to life in the spring. I couldn’t un- derstand why she was telling me all of this but I think I do now.”
“TThe young man was becoming even more furious every time he tried to open the locked door. I grabbed a rock from the side of the road and threw it at the window.”
“How do you understand that?”
“Well, everyone gets excited for spring. It’s always there. No mat- ter what happens to you, spring will always come. It’s something
to look forward to. This world is full of evil. Tragedy after tragedy. Spring is the time of year when everything that was dead during the winter comes back to life. Everything is rap- idly changing. One thing remains the same, spring. It’s as if spring is there to comfort us and say ‘don’t despair, I’ll always be here giving you a chance to be reborn, a chance to start over.’”
I never thought of spring that way. In a weird way, what Mag- gie said gave me peace.
“Maggie could you please open the window?”
The fresh air came pouring into the stale hospital room. The curtain gently uttered in the breeze. The laughter and shout- ing from the children below echoed throughout the courtyard. The smell of spring lled the room. I took a deep breath and
I could feel my lungs instantly tighten up. Pain shot through my body and my heart started racing. The heart monitor started beeping like crazy. In the distance I could hear the nurses running around trying to nd a doctor. Maggie kept calling out to me but I couldn’t even move my head to look at her. All I could do was think of what Maggie had told me. Nothing could ever stop spring from coming. Not even my death could prevent another spring from coming. As I closed my eyes I noticed that the heart monitor had almost seemed to stop. Even though I had been beaten down and bruised by life, I knew that my spring was just around the corner.
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