A Walker in the Suburbs

Winter won’t let go this year. More snow here, white flakes on green boughs, and little icicles dangling from the low rafters.

The daffodils hang their heads. Too soon, they must be thinking. (Too soon being an occupational hazard for the daffodil.)

As the season lingers, I ponder its good points, the way it keeps me inside, with an internal focus. Not yet ready for the late nights of summer, the outward focus of warmth and light.

The flurries out my window are welcome. I watch them as they float aimlessly to the ground.

It’s been a wild, wet, windy, snowy March — time to look ahead to warmer days.

To seek the spot of color in the still brown woods. The bright break in the clouds when the sun shines through.

The clutch of boats beneath the bridge, their hues out of place in storage but not when skimming the water.

Which they will do soon. We know this will happen. It always has before.

Spring arrives in less than two hours. I learn this not from feeling it in the air or hearing it in bird song but from looking it up online. Which is to say that it hasn’t felt much like spring this March.

This time last year we were coatless and reveling in cherry blossoms. This year we’re dodging “precipitation events” (what the weather folks are calling potential snow storms — just in case they go bust like the “Snowquester” did in parts of this area).

I’m not complaining about the cool temperatures. Last year was warm enough to be eerie. Spring will be all the more welcome when it arrives.

Not when it arrives at 7:02 a.m. When it arrives for real.

Pretend that you’re on a space station, I read this morning in the little book of Lenten devotionals that I picked up, for a dollar, at church. There your existence would be limited — no walks around the neighborhood or spur-of-the-moment drives downtown; and the food, nothing to write home about.

But your vision, your perspective, would be broad. The earth from space, the blue marble.

A funny image, but the more I’ve pondered it the more it has grown on me. Limiting some parts of life so that others might shine through.

Especially the quiet, contemplative parts, those that thrive without distractions. Time alone to think, to put things in perspective.

Forty days of that? Bring it on!

It’s one of the colder mornings of the year, but the birds don’t seem to notice. They’re rustling about in the azalea bushes, flitting from branch to branch of the denuded oaks.

They harken to some older signal, some lengthening of the day, some freshening of the wind.

They seem to think it’s spring, or at least the beginning of it.

Who am I to disagree?