The cusp of spring

It's just coming. The parking lot behind Thorne's downtown is full of white blossoms--are they cherries? I don't know but it reminds me of Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn right about now, the callery pears all in bloom all at once, and just for a single week. My favorite week of the year. Lily and I would stand looking down at about 7 at night and try to come up with words to describe it: goose down. ice cream. pillows. clouds. Lovely, in the soft street lights.

And here we have lots of forsythia, and the magnolia behind our house is bursting into purple-ish booms, and daffodils and a whole bunch of stuff I don't know the names of. I got a delivery of mulch today from Lashway, the whole nine yards, as they say, a big truck load, and the back tilts up and up and up and the mulch pours out. In the fall Lashway brings us a couple of cords of firewood and in the spring we get mulch, which we split with our neighbors. I need to find someone to deliver topsoil so I can fill in the holes in my yard. On Sunday I gathered a wheelbarrow's worth of twigs off the front yard and barely scratched the surface of what's there, but it was enough kindling for several fires.

Spring is here, solidly, and the weather is spring-like: that new green emerging in the trees, the flowers, the crisp mornings and sunny afternoons, the blue skies, and the occasional cold rains. Last week was positively hot but this week it's been cold enough in the mornings that I light a fire to study by. It takes the chill off.

I've decided that when I study I need it warmer than other times because I am sitting still for so long. I sit in the hot air blowing out and Chance comes and sits on the table next to me and presents her belly to be rubbed, knocking over the salt shaker in the process. I used to throw her off but she just comes immediately back up, so now I don't bother. It sure is nice to be loved.