The sound of a robin’s call always sends me back to childhood. It resurrects images of robins skipping across the lawn, pausing, then skipping again a few more feet, out by the apple trees on the slope beside my parents’ house. In April and May, I‘d watch them hopping around the yard. After the long, slate-gray winter months of a Minnesota winter, I was eager to get outside, and I’d walk barefoot through the yard, feeling the cold, fresh dampness of the muddy grass spurting up between my toes and listening to the birds calling.
I guess it makes sense that I associate spring with childhood. In the Northern Hemisphere, at least, spring is the season of childhood—biological, emotional, and spiritual.
