Spring was just on the other side of the threshold: icy rain on this side and sudden sun with warm petrichor on the other. He thought, as he clicked the fob of his Subaru, that his impatience for indifferent weather – weather without event – had reached its peak in the last week. Maybe it wasn’t just the weather. And it was due to his restiveness that he had decided to drive out (way out) into the country on roads that would take him out of the city’s dirty curbs and unshoveled slush.

A couple of hours led him to a small cemetery with not quite twenty gravestones showing varying degrees of weathering. But it was through the quiet site to the hill beyond it that he ventured. He descended a steep embankment and came to a stream recently released from the restrictions of ice and snow as it rushed and gurgled over cold rocks and downed branches.

Released! What a good, good word. He reached down and splashed the cold water with his hand, then yanked it out

quickly. It was freezing cold, yet pure and clear; and he supposed that’s what release from whatever burden or chain one wore, would feel like: bracing, maybe not even appealing at first, but then? Then the purity of freedom would race through his veins and into his very soul.

The afternoon spent itself as he thought over what that meant. He had a vague awareness of shemita, and, of course, a closer understanding of his own burdens and unmet desires and asked Almighty God above for such a release from something he couldn’t even name.

A cold raindrop fell, then another and another. He rubbed his arms and slipped on some gloves from his jacket pocket, then scrambled up the hill to his car. The rain changed from polite drops to the splat of threatening snow, and as he drove back to the bleakness of the city, he pondered the amount of time it took the stream to move from restriction to release.

The afternoon had done something to his tired spirit and somehow  rubbed away a little of clouded vision that had been his uninvited companion for too long. A muted future lost just a bit of its indifference. Burdens? Chains? Unseen restrictions? They would be gone! He didn’t know when or how long it would take, but he could even now feel the excitement of the early spring stream. And life again would see cleansing. Freedom. Release!

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