This spring has started as a real explosion of colors, it seems that it has never been more beautiful and more expected. The paradox is that winter was very short and mild and there were many inserts of spring during it. I mean the paradox is this... We always look forward to spring as it means the end of a long, hard, and freezing winter, but this year that was not the case, winter was almost inexistent.
From this experience, I have finally concluded that waiting for spring has nothing to do with the season before it. Waiting for spring is in fact waiting for change and rebirth, it takes this confirmation of nature that all is not lost, that there remains hope and a certainty that life overcomes obstacles and starts again every time!
I was almost dazzled by so much light and color brought by these spring days.... and then I took a trip away from the warm south of Romania, where I live now, and headed north to the Ukrainian border to visit my brother who stayed behind to live in our grandparents' house.
Why did I choose to see the north, beyond seeing relatives and places where I grew up? The answer is simple. Because the seasons there are later than in the south, there is a gap of at least two weeks and spring was not yet settled, the colors were still grey, dull, and lackluster.
It seems strange that after I said I was so looking forward to spring, the moment it actually came I ran to a place where it hadn't yet.
I think I was scared by the fact that in Bucharest, where I live, spring came too early and with too much force, I felt that something was missing, that transition period between winter and spring and I hoped to see this transition in the country, in the north of the country.
Even more, since I'm a grown-up I keep looking for that feeling I had as a child waiting for spring. The only place I thought I had a chance to find that feeling was the hills near my grandparent's house, my favorite place to explore and play as a child...
That hill, actually a plateau, was an ideal observation point. We could see the whole of a nearby village, a village famous for the apples the villagers grew, the village is called Radaseni.
I had a sense of freedom when I was a kid and I was on that plateau. Then, as a child, I didn't realize that freedom or where it came from, but now I think it came from the vastness of the space I could see, as far as the horizon. Something that I miss sorely now, in the big city I live in.
Beautiful childhood, divided between hills, valleys, fields, and lakes, I can't believe I was the happy child running around!
Sometimes even too much beauty can scare us. I'm trying to find the explanation for why I suddenly got in the car and drove almost 500 km from Bucharest to Falticeni, where I grew up and where my grandparents' house still exists. My grandparents no longer exist, unfortunately, and without them, nothing is the same.
Childhood happiness is something very far away and that I can only see in black and white. It has no connection to the very colorful present and is lost forever!
This is my entry for the #monomad challenge.
