Spring.
All things are orientated towards it.
It is like her Polaris.

Could it have been any other way? After her mother had named her ‘Spring’, like a kiss, and she grew buds in her hair like the english daisies she played amongst as a girl? No. From that day on, it would always be spring, of course. Spring – to be waited on, anxiously, like a Christmas morn. Spring – for that thaw to bleed the world of cold and white and bring back the bright blankets and pillows and crowns of flowers.

Even in the winter, she brings spring with her as she goes.
Even in the winter, there is fecundity and heat, in this woman. Eternal.
Not even the tipsy-topsy way the world had shook and balked had plucked the daisies from her dark hair.

She steps, delicately, through the icy crust of the snow. Really, she is aimless. Wandering. Moving for movement’s sake and, perhaps, to keep herself warm. It is, full-throated and unrelentingly, not spring. But the adversary and precursor of it. The hardest season, she thinks, for it is anticipation and meanness in equal measure; it is promising and forlorn all at once.

She does not hate winter. She only wishes it farewell.

She moves, too, because she finds herself so thoroughly alone, that to move seems better by far than to stand and wait. Spring is an animal bent towards many things. Towards nature and the way it grows around her and within her – on her, even, in the most curious of ways. But also towards companionship. Spring is, after all, a time of celebration and intimacy.

It is a thing that seems to want, above all, to drive people together.

Winter, on the other hand, is a different kind of master altogether.

(Though, one could argue, its cold makes for excellent snuggling…)