Spring

I got up this morning and could not bring myself to write. Something like a hangover afflicted me, too much of a good thing the day before. Not writer’s block. Writer’s indigestion.

Unfit to work I indulged in thirty minutes of solid loafing. Like, stare at the wall with my David Putty face kind of loafing. Then I got out for a short stroll in the sixty-degree morning, brushed by a gentle breeze.

Passing a neighbor’s open patio, I realized I never cleaned up last Fall’s detritus in my own back door space. I got out there with a broom and gave it a good going over.

This outdoors vigor reminded me that Spring begins this week. All the harbingers are there: buds on trees, birdsong in plenty, St. Patrick’s Day tomorrow, notable birthdays, then Friday: Spring.

As I pushed away the winter-matted leaves I felt my bunker mentality sort of lift. That mindset goes back four months, a ruthless period of personal and national setbacks. The traumas piled so high at one point that even a simple broken shower tile revealed the risk of much larger water damage upstairs. The kind of bad news that trails worse news in its shadow.

These months have been hard indeed and by one measure may only be the start of a much longer period of pain and suffering for friends and family and colleagues and people I don’t even know.

My refreshed mood cannot paper over any of that, or make it go away. We’ll live with it, finding a way to let positivity, action, and resilience be our guide. To do otherwise only makes dark times darker.

Our water trouble began on December 6^th, a day of infamy for me and the eve of an even greater day of historic infamy. After months of setbacks and delay, the shower installation should soon be complete. Just in time for spring, when all the buds open.

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