As told when the snowdrops return

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​⚘   ⚘   ⚘

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They say the old women of the valley used to count the snowdrops the way other folk count coins, one for each winter survived, one for each mercy granted. Dora had never paid much attention to that custom. She was not, by her own admission, a woman given to counting repeating patterns.

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But on the morning the world turned, she found herself counting anyway.

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As the snow melted into the ground, the snowdrops lifted up from it, concurrently, as they always had, as if the earth were making a trade it considered fair. White for white. Cold for something tentatively alive. Dora stepped out to take account. The air felt different. The growth of green had begun, and there was further proof than the snowdrops: the slight buzz of millions of buds churning, pulsating. Any day now they'd break free, too.

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This is church. Nature's hum.

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She had no prayer she knew the words to anymore. But standing there in the wet grass, with mud on the heels of her boots, she thought perhaps she had never needed one.​

✺

This spring equinox was the first time she stopped to think about lungs in such a way. Not her lungs in particular, though she could feel them, working faithfully as always, drawing the cold green air in and letting it go, but all lungs. The lungs of the kids sleeping late across the hill. The lungs of the baker already at her work. The lungs of ten thousand strangers on ten thousand dawns she would never witness.

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 8,000,000,000

BREATHS

RISING AND FALLING,

THIS VERY MOMENT

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Hers was only one of eight-billion-plus breaths, rising and falling. And that was not counting the flora and fauna, only humans. The thought did not make her feel small. It made her feel, for the first time in a long time, accompanied.

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She had heard the old story, the one her grandmother used to tell on equinox mornings, about how the world itself breathes differently once a year, exhaling winter, inhaling spring. How the snowdrops are not flowers at all, but the tips of the world's fingers, pressing up through the soil to feel the air, to check whether it is time. And when they find it warm enough, they signal the rest.

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All right, the snowdrops say.

We can begin.​

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✺​

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Dora had always thought that was merely a story. But standing in the equinox morning, she began to wonder if a thing could be merely a story and also completely true at the same time.

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She breathed in. Somewhere, without knowing it, eight billion others breathed with her.

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She breathed out. The buds pulsed. The mud softened. A robin she had not noticed until now sang one clear note from the fence post and then stopped, as if that were quite enough said.

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And here is the part the old women always added, leaning in close, as if it were a secret worth keeping:

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Dora stood very still. She let her breath slow until she could not tell where hers ended and the morning's began. And in that stillness, only a moment, and yet somehow longer than a moment, she felt it. The great breathing. The one beneath all the others. Not hers. Not anyone's. The breath the earth takes when it decides, year after year, to try again.

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They say she stayed out there a long time. They say when she finally came back inside and sat down at her table and poured herself another cup of coffee, she did not look like a woman who had simply gone out to check the garden. She looked like a woman who had been somewhere and returned.

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The snowdrops kept their white heads bowing all morning, as if in thanks, or prayer, or perhaps only because that is how snowdrops are, modest about the hopes they carry.

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By noon, the first green shoots were showing. By dusk, you could smell it everywhere: that particular green smell that has no name because it is not any one thing growing, but the idea of growing itself, breathing out through the skin of the world.

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Dora left her window slightly open before she slept.

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Eight-billion-plus lungs rose and fell in the dark.

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Spring had been given permission. Spring had begun.

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✺

_________________​

 

Told each year at the first thaw, so that no one forgets: you are not breathing alone.