The meaning of early spring

With the arrival ofEarth Month, I’ll be sharing a few stories with you this April on the theme of the planet and nature. Recently, the novelist Lydia Millet wrote for TIME about whathow the passage of the seasonsand time has changed for her as the impact of climate change has become increasingly apparent:

The summers I remember from my ’70s childhood were the season of play, idyllic days in a welcoming outdoors. We ran through sprinklers and ate ice cream; bees buzzed, trees fruited, cool breezes lifted the heat, and long afternoons settled into a velvet dusk. Schools were shuttered…and swimming pools were open. In summertime, living was easy and life was abundant: the closest we came, in the passage of the earth around the sun, to paradise.

We didn’t think of wildfires as we played, and neither did most of our parents. Those happened, of course—have always happened and, sometimes need to happen, in the wild grasslands and forests—but rarely were they juggernauts that wiped out towns inCaliforniaor burned up nearly3 billion animalsin Australia. We didn’t think of massive cyclones, churning over the Gulf of Mexico or the Caribbean in those ominous pixelated spirals one after another. “Heat wave” was a phrase lightly tossed out, maybe with the irritated fanning of a mother’s beaded brow. But rarely did a heat wave cause thousands inIndiato perish or push waters off the coast ofFloridato 100 degrees Fahrenheit, forcing biologists to scoop endangered corals out of the ocean and rush them into labs.

Millet writes that this new understanding of what the arrival of spring foretells can be just as much an inspiration to action as it can be new source of fear.

Please read her essay and let me know what you think. Sam@time.com.