I think this is the first week since we moved to Vermont where I've looked out and not admired the landscape around me. This week, unlike the nearly year of weeks before, it is not particularly beautiful. We started with a thaw and mud and perpetually having streaks of dirt on the back of our pant where our legs hit the edge of the (very dirty) car while climbing in and out and now are in the midst of another cold snap. The sap is frozen in the buckets. The mud has turned to icy ruts. The kids are back in snowsuits. The wind whips the trees around and stings out cheeks when we go outside for another armload of logs from the dwindling pile.
I was listening to a local poet on the radio yesterday talking about April being a month of hope. But not hope in the "spring is here" kind of way. More of a hope that spring will eventually be here. Of patience that if we wait a little while longer, there will be flowers and buds on the trees and warm days. I know it will come. We were here for it last year. Gloriously balmy days, hydrangias blooming all over town, kids leaping wildly off the big rock and plunging into the river. It will come. I keep telling myself it will come.
And then I put another log on the fire. Because it's not here yet. Burrrr....
