The sun came up upon the left...

We've had some sunny days this winter, but the difference in those days and this one is that those days were still cold. The sun might be brilliant, the sky pure blue, but it just lit up the snow and the white clear expanse of the frozen lake. But today I could feel the sun...and I'd forgotten what that is like. It's no snowstorm, but it's not so bad.

The front yard snow melted all the way off the walkway, and there is green grass under there. I found my wonderful red mitten with the knitted daisies on the wrist. It had been missing for a month, and I'm glad to find it again. Especially because now, perhaps, it will be too warm for the professional-looking ski gloves and mittens Joe bought me before he left. (He was right; in this weather, ridiculously expensive gloves are well worth their cost!)

Or maybe not. They keep telling me, with woe in their voices and weariness in their eyes, that a blizzard could still come, all the way up until Easter. At Easter, they say, with full-body sighs and a slump in their souls, we have The Mud.

I believe it about The Mud. I'm getting a horrible, black, mushy glimpse of it on this warm day. I've bathed Niki twice and Tula once. The white carpet is next. But the mud is fine, I suppose, because it comes with the sun, the ocean-colored sky, the birds I hear on our morning walk downtown.

Do I love these things of spring? Maybe not as much as I love ice and snow. But there is something to be said for them, especially when they start bursting into bloom. I can't imagine that right now, and I'm glad. That's one of the things I hoped to experience in a long North Country winter: The feeling that it would never be spring again, a longing for light and warmth. I don't long, but I think I will be pleasantly shocked to discover that flowers grow and leaves jingle and water moves.

What I do long for, on this weird warm day, is my husband. I miss him so much it takes my breath away. I feel lucky for it. And it makes me sympathize with my neighbors who wish for the sun like I wish for him.