Today is Thurs­day. Thurs­days are our garbage day. Luck­ily the garbage col­lec­tors come early to remove the week’s refuse and I don’t have to look at my garbage can sit­ting in the street all day long. I usu­ally pull it back to it’s spot in our back yard while Evan naps. Today was a beau­ti­ful day and we were wait­ing out­side for my son Michael’s bus to come and take him off to kinder­garten instead of indoors by the win­dow as we had been for the win­ter months. (Lucky me Mike’s bus stop is right in front of our home!) See­ing my garbage can just sit­ting there empty, I decided to return it to it’s spot in our back yard.

I had Evan (my tod­dler) in one arm-he was shoeless-while I hauled the can with the other. Man­ag­ing the two-was not an easy task-for my at times very unco­or­di­nated self, but I man­aged with a quick stop to pull lit­tle Evan back up to my eye level; as he’d slipped down to some­where around my hips and was look­ing up at me, his big brown eyes ques­tion­ing my judgment.

Once he was able to wrap his lit­tle arms around my neck-holding on for dear life-rather than affec­tion­ately lov­ing on his mommy, I began to haul my load back around my house when I saw stick­ing up out of the grass, lit­tle green leaves, that belong to my tulips! I couldn’t believe my eyes! There before me was proof that Spring was fast approach­ing and before to long the world would be green and won­der­ful and reborn again!

I had to take a moment to com­pose myself, there in my yard, babe in one hand garbage in the other. I am, through this post attempt­ing to ade­quately express how happy that lit­tle bit of green in my still brown snow flat­tened grass made me. I feel like I’m fail­ing. I imag­ine it’s akin to a marooned pirate finally able to set sail on his beloved ocean.

I was so over­joyed that as soon as Evan went down for his nap I was out­side, clean­ing out my flowerbeds get­ting ready to plant, and plant and plant! It felt so great to be out-of-doors. It really did. For a brief moment while I was out­side clear­ing away the pine nee­dles, and remov­ing most of my mulch my neigh­bor­hood qui­eted, and I heard for the first time in months the birds chirp­ing. It was a sym­phony as great as Mozart to my bird­song starved ears. I also got star­tled by an earth­worm while I was clear­ing the old mulch. I was care­ful not to hurt him and let him go about my busi­ness even though he made my heart skip a beat or four!

Hello spring. I’ve missed you.