When I was a child and my grandmother gave me a lemon drop candy, she would say “Suck it down slowly, don’t eat it,” but I ate it every time, imagining with a furtive shame what patience it would take to feel each drop of sour-sweet evanescing on my tongue. Why have I never been a more patient person? I used to think the gardens would teach me, but today a sea of snowdrops erupted all of a sudden the way I do—with love or fear or some more inchoate emotion—the thrumming of this just being here. God, they are beautiful. And strange. Their folded petals like a tidy delicate linen, but one with all the lushness of flesh, tenderness of secret, like the skin of an inner arm. In the mirror, I see where lack of patience has taken me—I am middle-aged, tired; I ruined what I had by wanting too much. And how am I different than anyone? Even if the sour-sweet lasted through morning, through sunlight, through my grandmother’s mumbled rosaries, how would I not feel just as I do now the pain of eternity or the longing, ever-present, for spring again—that tender snowmelt of girlhood, snowdrop, daffodil, the trees of blossom, bending and swaying in the new warm wind.