A breath of fresh...

...air. Spring is here -- or so they tell me.

Today was a white day: white sky, white trees covered in snow, white ground, white everywhere, very few other colors. I hear it's spring everywhere else, but not up here, but it's spring in my heart.

I hate fights and arguing. I had enough of that growing up from my mother and my siblings. I especially hate being on the outs with friends. Today a very dear friend and I had a long conversation. Nothing really important. A little give and exchange of information, a few jokes, teasing each other, and generally a return of the easy camaraderie we have shared until recently. It was wonderful. He laughed and I could tell he was smiling even when we got off the phone and switched to IM. For the first time in so many weeks I feel like I have my friend back and that is a feeling I have missed for so long. He had even deleted his LJ and I asked him to please undelete it. He did, for me. It isn't that he writes in it, he hasn't since last September, but I like knowing he's there and that I can go back and read what he wrote about himself.

What's important is that for the first time in a couple of months I feel like we're back on track and he's himself again. Granted, some of the problems were physical in nature, and that has been taken care of, but there were other difficulties, too, and it feels like we've resolved the worst of it.

I've always told him I'd rather have an hour with him than a lifetime with anyone else and I still mean that, but I'd prefer the hours keep coming.

Today is the vernal equinox, the time of the year when night and day are equal, when the world awakens and puts out buds and green fingers of leaves and grass and plants, and the trees deck themselves in soft pastel colors that float on the winds and fall in soft scented mounds on the bleak but burgeoning landscape. It is the time the earth promises that the cold and silence of winter are passing and life is returning. Up here, the birds are coming back and I saw two new ones, beautiful blue and white and black birds like none I've seen before. Red foxes jog down the dirt road along the beach sand-colored edges of the snow while the last of the great bucks peer from the shadows of the pine trees along the hillsides and does nose aside the slushy snow for the tender shoots reaching for the brightening sun. Ravens wing up among the scattered blue sky peering thru the white sky and arrow down toward bits of brightness struggling thru the ice and new fallen powder where rodents sniff and scamper among the bright burnt orange twigs of last year's bushes.

The promise of new life and returning friendship is in the air and I am intoxicated.