THE CHANGING OF THE LIGHT

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It is one of Those Days.  Slushy puddles in the driveway, an elusive sun, a warm spike that doesn't feel warm because the heat in the house is no longer consistently triggered.  The world is moping.  Spring is not coming soon enough and everything - the sky itself - is moody and impatient.

Nothing is as soul-sapping as the long uphill climb toward spring.  There are brief interludes that make you believe it might really be coming, but in truth it is a cruel trick.  I wish I could keep my expectations low enough to stave off disappointment.  I have done this for so many years that it doesn't seem right that I should expect anything so early, or that I should be so irrationally gloomy when nothing comes.  The yard will be brown for a while longer.  The trees are still hibernating.  They know that all of it is off in the distance.

And yet.  I have been noticing a shift in something that is almost intangible.  In the mornings when I still have one foot in a dream (usually nonsense) I recognize, with some insight that comes only when my mind is too sleepy to do anything on purpose, that the light is changing.  The daylight behind the blinds is changing incrementally, and I've been subconsciously keeping track of those first impressions through the months, and my waking mind is tabulating the data and noticing a slow upward climb in the charts.  It feels like something is happening.

In our old house everything has a personality, like the garage door (technically belonging to the garage, behind the house, but the same rules apply).  The door has very firm ideas about the weather.  It likes warm weather, but anything even remotely chilly sends it into fits.  When things turn particularly icy, we are forced to coddle and coax it laboriously in order to get our car in and out.

The garage door has been almost cooperative of late, which must mean something.

This is the switch that everyone feels.  Maybe summer sneaks in stealthily, and maybe autumn comes when you're looking the other direction, but you don't miss spring.  Spring is the one that has you squinting off into the distance, wondering if that might be something, there on the horizon, that little bit of something just out beyond the edge of everything . . . just there! Isn't that it?  Am I imagining that I can make out the outline?  Is it getting closer?

You know, I really think I can see it now.  Or maybe it's just a trick of the light . . .