Where Spring and Autumn shake hands
I had lived at the bottom of the world for twenty‑five years, long enough to know the winds by name and the sheep by personality, yet every year on the 1st of March I feel the same jolt — a small, bright confusion, like stepping into a room where the furniture had been rearranged overnight.
In Romania, 1st of March had always meant fresh beginnings. Red‑and‑white threads tied around wrists or pinned on the tops. Snow melting into hopeful mud. The first stubborn snow drops pushing through. Mărțișor was the promise that spring was coming, even if the air still bit your cheeks.
But in Southland, the 1st of March arrived with a different truth: autumn. The light softened. The paddocks turned gold. The first morning you reached for a sweater without thinking. The season of wool, warmth, and long shadows.
Every year I tried to hold both realities at once. I would wake on the 1st of March, pin a mărțișor to my chest, out of habit, and then step outside into a world that smelled unmistakably of fallen leaves. It made me laugh — the absurdity of it, the tenderness of it. Two hemispheres tugging at me like the ends of a braided cord.
That morning or 1st of March, I walked across the farm with Miss Socks trotting behind me, tail high, as if escorting me to some ceremonial appointment. The air was crisp, the kind that hinted at the first fire of the season. Yet on my chest the tiny red‑and‑white charm glowed like a spark of spring.
“Make up your mind,” I heard myself muttering to the sky. “Is this a beginning or an ending?” But the sky, as usual, refused to choose.
And maybe that was the point. Maybe I didn’t have to choose either. Maybe my 1st of March was a hinge — a day that opened in two directions at once. A day where I could honour the Romanian spring that lived in my bones while embracing the New Zealand autumn that shaped my days.
So I tied a second mărțișor to the fence post by the gate — one for the land I came from, one for the land I live in — and whispered a small blessing that worked for both: “Let this be a good season. Whatever season it is.”
Miss Socks approved, of course. She always approved of rituals that involved string.
And as I walked back toward the house, sweater warming my shoulders, charm tapping on my chest, I felt it again— that quiet, steady truth: Some people get one beginning. I get two.
Spring in my bones, autumn on my doorstep — and somehow the two get along just fine.
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