SPRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIING!!!!! HOOORRAAAAAAAAYYYY!!!

SORRRY!! I know, I didn't post yet. Don't even start in on me, and please don't hate me. It's just that the weekend was so beautiful and today I was just swamped with work, and on top of it all, for once in my life the book I'm reading right now is FASCINATING. and on top of all that, it's BEAUTIFUL OUTSIDE. Truly, heartstoppingly, mind-numbingly, springtimingly beautiful. I have no time to post anything new, but I'm going to put something up that I wrote last spring on just such an afternoon. While the exact circumstances differ (it hasn't been raining here, and we still don't have lots of leaves on the trees), this is true in spirit. Is there anything better than spring? (other than spring with no work to do that keeps you inside, that is.)

Ready? Ahem.


It's been raining here forever. At least 3 days, now, and the humidity has been barbaric. My hair looks like a beehive. But today it stopped. At some point between 2pm when I went down in the basement of the library to look at microfilms, and
5:45pm, when I came back outside, the clouds had gone away, the sun had come out (boy did it come out!) and everything all of the sudden looks clean and crisp and GREEN and the flowers are blooming and birds are chirping. It's a goddam mary poppins movie out there.

so I went for a walk. i smiled at strangers, and skipped instead of walking. i took some pictures to commemorate the kind of afternoon that makes me want to share it with you all whom i love so much. also, it makes me want to live in a pink house:


and drive a blue truck:


or sit outside and sip champagne on a porch like this:


or maybe in a hammock on a porch like this:


I saw people doing fun and unselfconscious things. Little boys playing in the yard with no clothes on. I wanted to take a picture, but their dad was there too, and he was giving me a look that very clearly communicated his inclination towards shooting first and asking questions later. So instead, I took a picture of this awesome chick:


(notice the gold shoes and great orange bandana. i want her bags.)


This is the kind of day that makes me notice small things, like the fact that my neighbors have this really awesome yard art which I've seen before, but never fully appreciated:


And for the first time in two years I finally stopped to take a picture of the lobsters on my sidewalk. I always step between them when I walk so I can pretend they're about to bite my foot, but I didn't want my picture to be scary, so I stepped back from that dangerous precipice:


I ran into my sort-of cat that actually belongs to my drug-dealer neighbor, but sometimes he comes over to play. he was enjoying the sunshine too, so we bonded for a moment...


And then when I came home from my walk I noticed that the grass in front of my apartment was maybe the prettiest green thing I've ever seen.


But the best new beginning of all happened this morning when it was still gray and humid and yucky and too early to be out of bed. At my physical therapy they strapped me into a corset-like weight-bearing harness (which gave me GREAT boobs, i must say), put me on a treadmill and let me run. It was only 10 minutes, but it was the first time since September that I've let myself do that, and it felt so wonderful that it was all I could do not to cry. So I laughed and jumped and giggled instead. It reminded me of when I was 14 and I was having a lot of operations on my lower back and then one day for the first time in 7 months I got to sit down on my bottom like a normal person. I wrote an ode that day, but I lost it. Poetry is beyond me right now, so instead I offer a photographic representation of my experience. Here's my shadow from this afternoon, remembering what it felt like to run this morning. (I know I look like a T-Rex, but I promise, I haven't shape-shifted. it's just the angle of the sun.


It's been a great day. I hope you all are having good ones too.