Spring in Granada

          Change always comes on fast; it catches up with us like time– the hour hand always precariously lazy next to the minute hand on a clock. At least we don’t notice change as it’s happening but rather when it decides to shake off the hard work and hike to the next town. You’re left wondering when it began, maybe you even missed the beginning because beginnings are, after all, very hard to spot.

            I think it was after Semana Santa. I got off the bus at Palacio de Congresos, arriving after my distant travels, and walked home with my heavy backpack and my camera bag slung over my shoulder. Just as I walked past the orange trees, always displaying their generous fruit, I noticed new irises– dark purple youngsters poking their heads from the ground. I stopped and turned, spotted more flowers, in the trees and in the ground, the smell in the air. I have always been quite observant when it comes to spring, I love looking for the first green sprigs of life on faraway tree branches but Granada’s spring somehow eluded me, she hid around the corner until I printed my boarding pass for a far away city. My temporary absence seemed short, like one of those movies where a minute in the present is a lifetime in a different universe. Granada decided to throw on her spring cloak just in time for the bus doors to open upon my arrival, when it only felt like I left a few minutes before. 

            I dropped my stuff in my room and changed. I grabbed my grocery bag and put sandals on. Outside was a new garden, a new Granada– full of even more life; the usual boring wood shade structures smiled with necklaces of light purple, cone-shaped flowers. The usual clumsy roller skaters I pass on my way to the grocery store seemed more graceful among the purple, like gliding dancers in Paradise. After I bought my groceries, I walked through Plaza Salón. Yellow, pink, light purple, and deep green. Change always comes on fast like spring in a winter bitten city. Sometimes we miss the beginnings but there is always time in the present to savor those ephemeral fleeting things.