Butt End of Winter

Around the corner cometh spring. There’s this treasure trove of gratitude in my heart as I take to the nature trails around us. For all of it, nature’s offerings seem even more vivid on the cusp between winter and summer. Some days the skies turn leaden, swollen with unspent rain clouds. On others, the lightest of blue skies be littered with cotton candy clouds, the trails around us alive with the cheeping and chittering of many eastern bluebirds, robins and mockingbirds, armies of busy, little woodpeckers carrying on with the business of pecking, and geese honking away in strident tones, conducting conversations in a language quite so foreign to this human listener. The boughs are astir with buds, hordes of magnolias promising to show up soon in their showy loveliness with fuzzy silver buds already saying hello to the onlooker. We are in the quiet phase of nesting, having spent most of the year gone travelling and mooching around the globe. Sometimes it may encourage ennui, these days of being at home, but on others, I appreciate the need to live a life of routine. Because more than we know, we need this. Be grounded. Connect with our inner selves. Be playful, such as pretending to be a beaver bringing trunks down (on a serious note though, I could not be as hard working as a beaver — just look at the marvellous job one elusive but persistent fellow has wrought). But that’s how one humours her husband. Or, be all about finishing tomes — my recent rereads including Herman Wouk’s war epics. Or, be mindful about most things on a day-to-day basis, right from skincare to fashion to what I put on our plates. Just the ordinary life, you know, one that feels fulfilling.