Me, I always looked for flowers. In March -- tiny green shoots first, then buds, then the full face of a crocus or snowdrop.
Too, Spring arrives with daylight savings time, though in recent years this has been complicated, as I have been going through two separate daylight savings jumps - one here, and one a few weeks later in Europe (to be repeated this year).
And now I have another marker -- a beautiful one at that!
But first, there is breakfast. With daffodils. (Grocery stores begin carrying them by the bucket load a good month before they open up their bright faces outside.)
And even earlier, there is farmhouse cleaning: the upstairs today, the downstairs tomorrow. And writing! Don't forget about writing!
Alright. I'm happy to have a clean home (or at least a clean bedroom and bathroom) and I am very happy to finish the editing job on the next one of the (too many) chapters of my Great Writing Project. But it's sunny outside and we're a bunch of degrees above freezing. Many on the east coast would be green with envy. Ed and I need to spend some time outdoors.
We do the easy walk -- on the trails of the newly discovered park segment just up the road. Through a dormant prairie...
... Onto a slip of land jutting out into Lake Waubesa...
(where you will still find a few bold fisher people doing their thing...)
An hour later, we are driving home and this is when spring really hits me in the face full blast. I mean, I knew they was coming, I heard them, I sensed their presence, but seeing is believing, no?
The sandhill cranes fly away from our state for the three months of winter: they leave in December and come back in March. They are back now.
And that makes me so happy!
Too, Spring arrives with daylight savings time, though in recent years this has been complicated, as I have been going through two separate daylight savings jumps - one here, and one a few weeks later in Europe (to be repeated this year).
And now I have another marker -- a beautiful one at that!
But first, there is breakfast. With daffodils. (Grocery stores begin carrying them by the bucket load a good month before they open up their bright faces outside.)
And even earlier, there is farmhouse cleaning: the upstairs today, the downstairs tomorrow. And writing! Don't forget about writing!
Alright. I'm happy to have a clean home (or at least a clean bedroom and bathroom) and I am very happy to finish the editing job on the next one of the (too many) chapters of my Great Writing Project. But it's sunny outside and we're a bunch of degrees above freezing. Many on the east coast would be green with envy. Ed and I need to spend some time outdoors.
We do the easy walk -- on the trails of the newly discovered park segment just up the road. Through a dormant prairie...
... Onto a slip of land jutting out into Lake Waubesa...
(where you will still find a few bold fisher people doing their thing...)
An hour later, we are driving home and this is when spring really hits me in the face full blast. I mean, I knew they was coming, I heard them, I sensed their presence, but seeing is believing, no?
The sandhill cranes fly away from our state for the three months of winter: they leave in December and come back in March. They are back now.
And that makes me so happy!