Spring, romantic (or not)

As a lover of warm weather, I’ve always welcomed spring. Where I’ve lived, spring is often more about the promise of warmth than actual warmth, but a promise is good enough for me: The trees will not always be bare! I will not have to huddle stoically under suffocating layers of clothes forever! The blood will circulate all the way out to the tips of my fingers once again!

And then there are the flowers. They start with brave and hardy witch hazel, crocuses and snowdrops poking their heads up through leaf litter or snow, but by April everything is blooming everywhere. The breeze carries the rich scent of hyacinths and, later, lilacs. Light returns! I no longer have to get up in the dark and come home in the dark.

Light returns! And it can't get here fast enough, if you ask me.

When I was a teen, I always thought spring was the perfect time to fall in love. Spring seems like the beginning of something important: full of beauty, full of promise. As it happened, no magical knight ever swept into my life bedecked in spring flowers. Back then, I had no cinematic romances to match spring’s perfect backdrop, and that seemed like such a waste! Like sitting alone in a honeymoon suite.

Consequently, in my stories, I can approach spring in two ways: with romances fit for the season (that’s the type of spring I found as an adult—and it probably won’t come as a surprise that I chose a spring wedding), or featuring that unrequited longing made sharper by contrast with spring’s romantic setting (more like my actual teen years). I think my first book, The Secret Year, had the first kind of spring; my second book, Try Not to Breathe, had the second (although romance blooms at another time).

These are lupines. They are actually summer flowers, but they are magical, and they are waiting in the wings.

 Hope you’re having a magical spring, no matter what!