I Could Have Died

Dear Kate,

I was sniffling this morning and I thought, Hey, what's up?  I felt amazing otherwise.  I should have figured it out then but it was not until noon when my left eye asked for a scratch that I realized it was spring came early, respecting no category or calendar, spring doing what spring does—live.

In the heydays of my youth hay fever numbered my days and everything to me felt endless: endlessly runny, endlessly tearful, endlessly stuffy and congested and begging for the air to clear so that a little life can be possible.  All the while buds of life were bursting out endless possibilities, "out there."  There was a time I simply didn't want to leave home; I, a grotesque lump of mucus addicted to white fiber.

How I went from pleading with the season of death to falling into the spell of life is a spring story I tell year round, a pourquoi tale giving an etiological account of the new Alex, born again the day he went out to play, to a garden of endless delights that is this beautiful world.  Even now it is not unusual for me to say No to a day's end, troubled by how it wasn't properly—fully lived, cheating death whenever I can.  "It is not bed time yet!" I shall protest to the end.

If there was Zoom back then in my youth I would have died very young.  Covid is not our first question, vaccine not our final answer.  I would have told you spring was the Devil itself.

Yours, Alex