We awoke on the first day of spring to fat snowflakes, no threat of accumulation, just the fall, hypnotic in its way, while the traffic and the trains cut through the white.
Many years ago I used to pass hours flopped on my bed, reading while listening to the radio, usually Top 40 and then through the late sixties to the great SF FM radio stations, and reading. It was a terrible way to study, but a great way to get lost in a novel or travel memoir. Somewhere I got away from that small but perfect pleasure. Could have been kids, could have been living abroad where the music often didn't interest me much, although now Latin is an often first choice. But lately I've been disinterring that pleasure, with the purchase of an iPod dock clock radio. Started last weekend in an upstairs bedroom in Richmond, during a weekend seeing the not-so-new-anymore granddaughter when the sun didn't come out for four days of nearly steady rain and temps that never got out of the forties. Continued during that first day snow and then today as a cold set in.
But, yesterday, that second day of spring, fine, sunny. I gave a great private tour at the museum to two visitors from Florida and then joined New York as it spilled outside, in my case to Riverside Park. The dark blue and lavender crocuses are up, daffodils stems are turning dark green, and even here and there a tulip stem breaks the surface. Couples and Westies were out in force, baseballs flew and smiles broke out on tight winter lips. It wasn't the temperature, which never made it above fifty. It was just the sun and that light spring scent on the air. As if that weren't enough, the shuffled iPod dished up these five songs on the twenty minute jog -- Between the Daylight and the Dark, Mary Gauthier; The Geese of Beverly Road, The National; Different, Acceptance (don't know the band, don't know how it ended up on my iPod, but a good Nada Surf-sounding lead singer); Wrecking Ball, Crooked Fingers; and Just A Girl I Used to Know, George Jones. World's turning again, and welcome.
