Spring is certainly my favorite season at Yale (although fall is a very close second). After a long, cold winter, everything seems to come alive again, with pink blossoms falling from trees on every corner and flowers blooming in the residential college courtyards. It’s also a season of gratitude. I’m grateful for getting through another semester, my friends, and for the natural beauty of campus. While spring at Yale feels like a new beginning, it also signals that the end of the school year is approaching. I’ve always appreciated how these two contrasting ideas seem to exist harmoniously with each other on campus.
Blossoms!
Blossoms on the ground!
When the pandemic hit last year, we were all robbed of a beautiful spring at Yale; reflecting on that time, this is one of my most painful memories. Spring brings not only beauty, but also joy, sunshine, and a renewed sense of togetherness. Especially in the isolation of COVID-19, I missed these things a lot.
But there’s always a silver lining: because our semester started a bit later than usual this year due to the pandemic, we got to enjoy even more of the spring weather this year. In addition, many students were fully vaccinated by early May, and everyone was buoyed by the sense that there was, indeed, a light at the end of the tunnel.
I’m smiling reeeeally big under my mask.
Thanks to the efforts of the entire Yale community, we were all able to enjoy campus again in spring 2021. I got to just meander through campus, appreciating the gorgeous trees in Branford and the bright tulips in Jonathan Edwards. I reunited with friends for picnics in the shade of the giant elm trees on Cross Campus, listening to the sounds of ukulele drift out from another group and dodging stray spikeballs from an intense game happening close by. The sense of exuberance we all felt this spring was heightened by an awareness of what we had, since we all knew what it felt like to lose it.
The view from Branford’s courtyard is potentially my favorite spring landscape.
Like I said, spring is a time of beginning and ending. But this year, it was mostly the beginning–the start of many brighter seasons ahead.
