As my sister drove our ninety-eight-year-old mother (at left) to Sunday church this past weekend they encountered a detour that took them through a neighborhood known to be controlled by gangs. "We need to keep the doors locked, Mom," my sister warned.
"It's okay," my mother said, "I see robins in the trees."
My very young grandchildren and very old mother seem to carry more wisdom than do most of us. A veteran of ninety-nine Aprils, my mother knows the real hope of the robin.
In hospitals across our country, it is the last spring for some, the first spring for many. No matter how long we've lived, each spring is new. Life never seen appears before us.
In the western United States, spring shows a different wardrobe than she does in the south, where she is in mid-journey. In the northeast, spring squeezes in a short life between winter and summer. In the midwest, where I spent much of my adulthood, April offers a delicious invitation.
April in the North
Every April, the ground unbuttons herself to welcome the sun.
I have seen this before.
Or maybe I haven't.
It is the first time that these just-born leaves twirl from their buds.
In woods of northern Ohio, green crowns.
This earth I occupy swallows more of me each spring.
I melt back into her, struggling against her quicksand or exhaling relief.
But, I am remembering once more what I forget each winter.
There, on at the top of April's stairs, truth's hard soil softens into hope.
-Reverend Erie Chapman
Journal of Sacred Work 
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