The Princess felt Spring with every cell in her body. Feeling, she thought, wasn't the same as just being aware of it: rather, it was so much more. Her eyes registered that the dawn came earlier and the nights drew in later. She had to stock up on antihistamines when the flowers came into bloom. She didn't need to wear a heavy coat any longer and when storm clouds came and refreshed the earth with rain, the drops that fell no longer carried a chill. Rather, sometimes she felt tempted to stand in the downpour with her arms extended and feel washed clean by the tempest.
No, Spring had touched her on a deeper level, she thought. She felt it when she looked out over her garden on a Saturday morning. It was 7 AM, the sun was already high and the skies were blue. The hard work her gardener had put in over the winter was paying off: vast arrays of tulips and daffodils had come into bloom, punctuating her vast expanse of lawn with bright explosions of yellow, orange and indigo. Wild daisies popped up between the blades of grass. Beyond, the garden extended down to the edge of a lake: mist was still rising off of it, but it was no longer winter's last chilly exhale, rather, it was more like a puff of steam indicating the heat the day would generate.
The Princess stood quietly, sipping her coffee out of a white porcelain mug. Her feet were bare: she felt the polished texture of the wooden floors beneath her.
Seasons were odd to her at first. She was a child of the Equator: the sun was constant there and heat never fully retreated. One could sit outside in a café on the Boulevard de la Liberté in Douala just as easily on an October morning as an April one. She remembered just such an October morning: she wore a grey Chanel dress and high heels, her sunglasses firmly affixed to her face to protect her eyes from the brightness of the Cameroonian sun. An obsequious, almost impossibly thin waiter in a starched white jacket brought her coffee without a word spoken: she merely had to nod. After all, as Father told her, she was a Princess. The coffee came in a small white porcelain cup and a steel coffee pot. She then sat back and observed the colour, bustle and noise of people and traffic.
So long ago. The Princess could not have stayed there.
She took another sip of her coffee. When she had first experienced seasons upon arriving in America to go to medical school, it had come as a shock. Freezing hitherto had been confined to an ornament on Father's desk, a snow globe which she recalled taking awkwardly into her six year old hands. It contained a Parisian scene, including the Eiffel Tower and Montmartre. She had turned it upside down, carefully, as Father had urged, and shaken it. When she turned it back, the flakes had fallen. But that was not the same as being in Philadelphia, exhaling hard into the grey dawn and seeing her breath form into mist. Nor did it prepare her for the masses of white flakes which the sky poured down onto her hair and shoulders. She became like the other students, wrapped in a dull, dark parka. There was no Chanel nor café on the Boulevard de la Liberté. Rather there was a diner that looked like it had been converted out of a railway box car, stamping the snow off her feet on a black doormat when she entered, and the watery brew that Americans dared to call coffee.
But that was long ago too.
She had moved South to where the seasons had been more reasonable. She had prospered. She had adjusted. She had a home of her own, and she was standing in the morning by the window of her palace. It was a quiet realm apart from the sound of the occasional passing car, the birds singing, and the click of cicadas communicating to each other. She stood at the threshold wearing her green silk robe, so finely woven that it almost shimmered like it was made of a green metal.
She sighed. She saw bees making their slow and steady progress up her garden, taking nectar and carrying pollen from flower to flower, fertilizing. The birds that sang, she imagined, were male and female singing to each other, calling to each other. No doubt animals in their burrows were still nestled in, and sensing warm bodies, coupled and mated.
