As I’m writing this letter, it’s a mid-March morning and I’m looking out my window at the street sign. Grandview Avenue. It’s an apt name for the street, sitting atop a bluff with a pleasant vista overlooking the neighborhood where I grew up. On this particular day, the freshly fallen snow has climbed two feet high on the signpost.

It’s just two weeks before spring and only a week after temperatures flirted with the ‘70s. I was dreaming of blooming tulips, green grass and baseball on a sunny April day while I shoveled the walk and dug out the car. 

While shoveling, it took four passes to reach bottom. As the path methodically made its way from porch to sidewalk, the depth of the freshly cut, narrow swatch reminded me of my childhood and what fun it was to frolic and roam in the snow, building forts, igloos and snowmen and climbing the huge snow mounds on the street’s edge, placing us at eye level with the porch roof and playing king of the mountain. Everything seems so large and grand in those memories.

I made another observation as I scraped the deepest pass of the shovel against the concrete. Bending low to lift, I knelt into the depths of the snow canyon I was cutting, revealing the quiet world that exists underneath two feet of freshly fallen snow. Three layers…light and fluffy at top, blue in the middle and moist at the bottom; each translucent with various shades of light…held the silence.

I was transported for a moment; it was a fleeting second that suspended like an eternity, and then fell into the depths of my unconscious. And then it was gone. It was a brief glimpse into the still silence of the hidden mind, like a lucid dream, filled with hopes, possibilities, fantasies and a few fears, all swirling together and existing separately.

I stopped, stood and pondered what had just happened as I stared at the snow. I began shoveling again and realized that underneath the snow is the pending spring, and with it, fertile ground for a new beginning; a time to plant seeds of change.   

As spring is upon us, perhaps the time is ripe for change in your life. Whether change is coming for you or not, remember the time to feel good, live simply and laugh more is now.