Oh God. It's Spring.

Just dashed out to do an errand or two and drove past groves of young trees clad in that ethereal pale barely-budded-leaf spring green. I drove past an apple tree whose old, gnarled, twisted, crabby limbs had just been covered with a bountiful blessing of white blossoms, giving it back youth and beauty and joy. I drove past delicate blossoming cherries in the sunlight, like a line of dancers standing on tiptoe holding out their graceful arms to the sun. I drove past flowerbeds bursting with nodding daffodils which had bent under that unnatural snowfall we had the other day and had shaken off its memory like a bad dream and now stand upright and bright and yellow and cheerful. Everything is bursting out or budding out or just trembling on the brink of it - the magnificent magnolia on the corner of one of the intersections we drive through on our way to town is barely contained, its branches glimmering with just-about-to-open white flowers.

And we haven't even hit the rhododendron season yet.

It's all so beautiful and so full of life and hope and great expectations. It's enough for even a dyed-in-the-wool pessimist like me to break a heart over, for the sheer beauty of it, for the sound of birdsong in in the air and the sunlight which is warming now and is no longer that brittle sharp winter light which pierces like an icicle where it lands - this light flutters and folds around tender shoots, the beat of butterfly wings, the softness of new petals.

It's usually fall and winter that have my vote - I like it when the days get cooler and the light gets sharp and uncompromising and the winter days follow one another as though etched in frost and glass - but really, spring, out here where we live.. it's enough to convert me. At least right now, right at this instant, when I'm watching flowers open like children's dreams.

It's spring.