Friday, April 7, 2017, mid-afternoon:
For a while it was perfect. But then that’s the way it often is with ideal moments.
Low, gray clouds parted, offering a too-tempting, vast patch of unstained blue with the sun pinned bold and warming in the center of it. What would you do?
I sat on a stool out in it, on an island of wet gravel between dying mounds of snow. I ate a juicy apple and drank a bottle of solid Maine stout and read from an excellent novel—Stardust by Neil Gaiman—and the moment was fine.
Twenty minutes or so of fine, actually. I came to the end of a chapter, apple core at my feet and an empty brown bottle standing beside it, when clouds once more blundered in.
But not before I saw Robin Redbreast land in a white birch and chortle six quick notes before winging northeast-ish.
I do believe that Spring, indecisive as ever, has arrived.