Cherry Trees and D.W. Winnicott

It is spring, which inspires me to do crazy things like start running again. I don’t know that I actually like running, but this season of the year I decide it’s time to remember trees and fresh air and flowers- that real, budding life exists outside textbooks.

There is this one glorious cherry tree I get to run under on Wallingford Avenue. She is dressed up like a bride. I had a lovely cherry tree in my backyard growing up; the sweet scents today make me remember being a little girl and jumping on our big trampoline near the blooming tree, so that blossoms would float down on my head as I somersaulted. Running down Wallingford Ave, life moments 20 years apart seem to intersect.

I keep being visited by that little girl- fresh moments of the past arriving rather unannounced. Such visitations, of course, are the symptom of a mind rather saturated with psychology classes, where I am consistently asked to consider my own "story" and wonder about who I am- and who I was. Where are the links between my present self and how I first experienced the world? This is the question that seems to beckon the visitations. I have seen her alot lately, sort of hovering in the moment. When she is not jumping on trampolines, she is writing children's stories or reading novels or worrying about her grades or waiting to be loved or wondering who she will become. She says hello in unexpected places. I sat in a coffee shop this afternoon, and the dry, technical pages of my textbook succeeded in evoking her. She arrived with salted drops. I am not really a public crier, but there was something so bittersweet. I know her too well. This deep integration of my studies and my introspection leaves me never quite knowing when my brain decides to surrender to my heart and I am emotional in a coffee shop over D.W. Winnicott’s waxing on about "object relations" and “transitional phenomena."

Goodness, perhaps, I should have elected a career in engineering? (But then I would most certainly be crying over my calculus problems.)