Ronald Kok, A Bit of Spring for Heidi, 2018

Last week in this space I posted a small painting I had made for my wife for Valentine’s Day. It was a grouping of six red/orange tulips against a white background. A dear and long-distance friend of ours saw the painting online and commissioned a similar one for herself, only this time with yellow tulips. As she put it from her similarly wintry surroundings, “I am in great need of spring (in my heart and in the weather!)”.

Winter does that to those of us who can’t escape to Cuba or the Dominican Republic or some other such exotic and warm locale. At first, I enjoy Winter. When the snow falls and the skies turn bright blue in the cold, cold days, I really don’t mind. In fact, I love so much about it. But after a few weeks, usually near the end of January, you realize that Winter has come to stay. And it lingers and lingers… The season becomes like a relative that you’re happy to have stay with you for a few days because they’re fun and fresh and provide a distraction… but then they end up staying with you for about four months instead, and start leaving underwear on the floor and peeing on your toilet seat. Winter can be fun and different and enjoyable for a time but then the bad habits of the coldest season show up – Freezing rain (or worse freezing drizzle – the combination of those two words just sounds awful), huge brownish-blobs of heaped up snow along the roadside like a forbidding and ugly mini-mountain range, cars filthy with salt and dirt. Recently, I saw a van so covered in crap that I literally couldn’t tell what color it was originally though I’m pretty sure it wasn’t “River Silt Brown”.

Winter brings its charm but also brutalizes. And it can wear you down as you wait… and wait… and wait. For what? For change. For thaw. For Spring.

I appreciated the chance to revisit tulips in watercolors (thanks, Heidi!). Hopefully, if you are also dragging your feet along, tripping and shuffling through the most dire days of Winter, my simple offering of the promise of Spring gives you hope and a bit of renewed energy. Always at about this time of year, I have to remind myself that, to quote Oprah Winfrey, “A NEW DAY IS ON THE HORIZON!” I know she wasn’t talking about Spring but I hear her voice in my head as I’m thinking about it.

As I know what’s coming, eventually, every year as we go into Winter, I’m beginning to see that I may need to paint more Spring flowers come February. It is a good way to beat back the blahs and bring in the joyful expectation.

So enjoy this bit of Spring as you wait… and wait…. and wait…