Spring

I love Spring.  I love the return of light and life and watching Orion slide back down towards the horizon, taking long, cold nights with him.  I love opening the windows and letting the sounds and smells come in once more, pushing winter staleness out.  I love watching my plants shoot up out of the ground and cover themselves with bloom in what sometimes seems like just hours. I love watching the lawn wake up out of Winter brownness and shoot up dark green faster than I can get the mower ready to deal with the season.

This has been an early and spectacular Spring, and I've relished every moment of it.  I had to close up and turn the heat on for the first time in a couple weeks yesterday as we briefly sank to normal temperatures, but mostly my house has been open to pollen and bugs and I don't care - I love Spring.

We had an electrical fire at the office last Thursday morning.  The buildings had to be closed, which normally wouldn't matter because I telework, but it knocked our servers offline.  Once I finished up the work I could do without them I was free as a bird and Thursday and Friday were spectacular.  The house, front porch and porch furniture got power washed, the porch got re-stained and the furniture got a new coat of polyurethane.  The new hummingbird/butterfly beds got dug up and supplemented, and yarrow, dwarf butterfly bush, and abelia joined the bee balm.   Mulch got put down.  The patching of a problem area began - I need to get the grass established there before the Summer heat gets here.  Some flowers that weren't doing well in one place got moved to another where I hope they will do better.  And all the while I mentally sorted through what I want to put in a couple beds that are shady and the deer keep wiping out.  No impatiens this year.  Maybe a variety of ferns.

I'm exhausted.  My joints are sore.  There's 400 more pounds of top soil in the back of the SUV waiting to get shifted to bad spots that need leveled.  I need to mow today.  I'll probably need to mow again Saturday.  My sprained finger is pissy and sore because I don't stop long enough to let it heal.   I haven't even made it over to St. Peter's to start on Mary's garden there, or started on the beds over at St. James.

And the trees are covered in hazy green through which bright birds fly and I am very, very content.