Before I knew better, I devoured Gone with the Wind. As a preteen, I’d stay up all night reading it under the covers with a flashlight, then start over again to best my time. I watched it on the big screen every chance I got. I blame GWTW for my lifelong yearning to visit southern plantations in the full flower of spring. Perhaps the hoop skirts would be gone, but the rhododendrons, azaleas, dogwood, magnolia–they’d be magnificent!

“You could take the special tours set up from the point of view of slaves,” my friends who had gone on Civil Rights tours helpfully suggested. (This was when we all said “slaves” instead of “enslaved people.”) Of course I would do that, too, but I wanted the full-on Tara experience. Again, minus the hoop skirts and the enslaved people.

I confessed my guilty wish to my friend Lisa. Disgusted, she said, “Why don’t you just visit Filoli instead?”

Filoli is a 645-acre estate just a bit south of San Francisco. It was originally built in 1917 as a private residence for William Bourn, who controlled the Empire Mine and San Francisco Gas Company, orchestrating a merger that became Pacific Gas and Electric. According to Wikipedia, Bourn’s investment in a water company bought by San Francisco led the San Francisco Chronicle to regularly pillory him as a thief and scoundrel for water rates, 

But at least the man didn’t enslave people. The name Filoli, the website explains, is derived from the first two letters from the key words of Bourn’s personal credo:

Fight for a just cause.

Love your fellow man.

Live a good life

Not bad for a rich guy described as a “socialite and entrepreneur.” In fact, the website rather hilariously features a Land Acknowledgment (the estate is “situated on the unceded ancestral lands of the Ramaytush Ohlone,” and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion language is plastered all over the “About” page.

Since Filoli can best be described as a lovely destination for the Ladies Who Lunch crowd, this seems a bit much. But again, at least it’s not Tara. And the owners after the Bourns included an avid gardener whose family bequeathed the estate to the public in 1975.

So I’ve taken Lisa’s advice, and tried to mitigate years of mainlining plantation propaganda by visiting Filoli. Recently I even got a membership. Since Filoli was slammed by the drought and pandemic (and because those Ladies Who Lunch are of an age when they keep dying), they’ve gone all out to entice new members with huge discounts.

Now Filoli’s my go-to place. Last week the roses were in full bloom:

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There’s even a dogwood in full bloom for those of us with that southern yearning:

Yes, I know that officially yesterday was the first day of spring, but in my book, the cusp doesn’t count. The real deal is March 21^st, embedded in my brain and on my calendars since childhood. That childhood was spent in New England, where usually a blanket of snow lay unperturbed by the date on the page. I’ve lived in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1977, where daffodils burst forth and the Japanese plums are festooned with a cloud of pink blossoms just in time for Valentine’s Day. But the calendar defies lived experience. March 21 is the first day of spring, and that’s that.

March 21, 2020, is also the wedding date of a couple unknown to me to whom I am eternally grateful. Without their long-planned nuptials, my daughter and her boyfriend would have moved from San Francisco to Brooklyn on the first of March. But they delayed their departure to witness a cousin’s joy.

That short time span, of course, was when our world turned upside down. I think of my daughter and her boyfriend trying to find an apartment and navigating the subways, newly arrived in the pandemic’s epicenter. Instead, they scrambled to see if they could rescind the notice they’d given on their nearly packed apartment. (Yes, they could!) They started working remotely for the same tech companies whose New York branches had beckoned. They kept abreast of the cousin’s rapidly shrinking wedding plans and slept unperturbed by constant sirens.

My husband and I drew huge sighs of relief. They were safe, at least for now. Not the fate, sadly, of so many. We felt the shock and sorrow of the deepening horror along with our luck.

We also felt lucky that it was spring when shelter-in-place began. The green hills, blossoms, and soft breezes would see us through until things got better—around July, I figured in those early days. Surely by then universal masking, testing, contact tracing, and cooperation would have contained the virus.

Instead, things got worse, catastrophically so for tens of millions in this country alone. Groundhog Day, the 13^th month of March, our long, dark winter, the apocalypse—whatever we called this strange time warp of everything different while also the same, it seemed like it would last forever.

Then the vaccines came. It felt like deliverance, even though we were cautioned that not much could change.

Here’s what changed immediately, though. Despite some lousy side effects those two jabs can cause, the most pronounced and immediate are the rush of joy and hope. Whereas last spring marked our entrance to Hell, this spring feels like we may truly soon emerge if we don’t abandon our senses.

To celebrate (fully masked and vaccinated), my friend Mary and I met at Filoli, a gorgeous estate south of San Francisco known for its gardens.

We’ve visited many times over the years, but savored this time especially. Not just for nature’s splendor, but for the extraordinary appreciation of all the ordinary things like seeing a friend in person and not over Zoom, making plans, envisioning a good future. (Still, nature was pretty splendid):

As for the couple who saved my daughter and her boyfriend from moving to a Covid hotspot? Today marks their first anniversary (the ceremony occurred as scheduled, though with a tiny group of masked intimates, our two not among them). Happy anniversary—and congratulations on the birth of your baby earlier this month!

Spring is indeed here again—a time of hope and renewal.

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What is your antidote to world weariness?