Monday Morning So Unlike the Last

As I stepped out into the warmth of that first day, the first one of the year, that really feels like spring, I couldn't help but smile. There were birds at the bird feeder, a regular choir of Robins, gloriously red Cardinals, tiny Nuthatches, Titmice and Sparrows, and the occasional Bluejay or Mockingbird. I laid upon the warm cement slab that is my back porch, shirtless. I closed my eyes, the sunlight passing through the lids with a diffusion of red from the many cappilaries there. I sat and listened to the songs of the birds, occasionally accompanied by a distant windchime singing in the cool spring breeze. I was happy.

I had become weary of the grey skies over-top of grayer clouds over-top of streets grayer still. I had grown tired of that chilled to the bone, numb to the base of the skull feeling that sinks in after it has been 40 degrees Fahrenheit and raining three days a week for three months straight. I was beginning to come unwound. Cabin fever, that sort of thing. My mind was operating on a near-reptilian level, all non-food-clothes-medicine related function was confined to an area of the brain about the size and consistency of a pile of cotton balls left on the moist counter next to the bathroom sink for too long.

I think, however, that somewhere within the last few sentences my train of though flew horribly off its track, the pointof this was not the hellish winter, but rather the glorious emergence of a new spring. In stating this, I think I may have reached the true heart of what I was trying to say: Without the hellish winter, today would not have been the first glorious disctinctly spring day of the year, today would have simply been Monday.