Spring, like Carl Sandberg’s fog, “comes on little cat feet.” One minute, the bluster of March threatens to steal your hat; the next, those lacy red maple buds are puffing up, their bright green leaves forthcoming. We need spring urgently this year, and the promise and hope that it carries.

Last May, we went north for the first time since 2019. For a while, the obstacles seemed unrelenting: first there was COVID, then “real life” threw some significant hurdles. But we were finally able to pack up the car and head north. Just across the New York border into Vermont, everything looked oddly different, even surreal, to me. The day was gray and misty, but there was no reason for a very familiar route to seem a beat or three off. After a few stops at favorite haunts, then on to New Hampshire and Maine, it finally came to me. I had been to New England in late spring, but never in early spring. The trees, the fields, the cloudy sky, even those beloved mountains—everything was cast in gray-green light, with splashes of yellow here and there.

This trip was more challenging than the near effortless ones we’d made together for more than two decades. As much as we like to think of the retirement years as freewheeling and unfettered, that is not always the case. They may begin that way, but after a few carefree years, complications set in—not always unmanageable, but ever present in the back of your mind if not the front. We can choose to face them and adapt as needed, or stay home and watch our world grow smaller and smaller (I’ve done a bit of both). A fair amount of baggage, however, remains beyond our control.

One year later, I feel similarly, but for a different and in some ways more daunting reason. I love journeys. I think that’s one of the reasons why I’m so addicted to travel, history, books, the arts—they are all journeys of a sort. They widen the world for us. Happiness comes harder when the world around you, the world you’ve known and loved all of your life, the world you’ve given your children and grandchildren, suddenly turns into one you don’t recognize.

If I could turn back time, even just to last year’s misty New England spring, I would do it in a flash.