The spring seems slow to arrive despite the persistance of the sun. The trees are still bare, though I can see a faint red blush of new buds on the branches in certain light. The colors are muted; outside my window, the shingles of neighboring home are brown, white, and grey, like the tree branches, and the sky is a smokey blue suffused with white.

I am having ahard time imagining what is to come. Of course, there will be tulips, followed by bleeding heart; a carpet of sweet woodruff, and tiny ferns poking their heads out soon. But how will we, I, change? How will we take all that has happened to us, the news of murder and hate, of voting suppression, of the invisible plague that is actually getting worse, not better, despite the slow supply of vaccines? People are getting their shots, but must remember to wear their mask, that a vaccine is not a golden ticket but a step.

I am on a party-planning committe for a community-birthday for 2022. A year from now, I feel hopeful that a party of people can congregate in close quarters, share food and laughter safely. But I can’t imagine it this summer. Maybe small backyard barbeques will happen this Fourth of July if enough people are vaccinated. But what of children, of the young adults? I am having a hard time visualizing it.

But we must visualize it, we must see over the fence.

The mourning doves have laid at least one egg, and are taking turns to sit on it.

The mourning doves have made a nest and are trying it out. Right as rain, on the first day of spring.

I started to clear out the balcony pots, so I won’t disturb their nesting to much. Deconstruction causes more noise than construction after all.

In the writing class I am taking with 2400 other people, we meditated for twenty minutes. Later, we were asked to write about noise in four examples.

The weather is warming up enough to abandon the coat, though I chippped ice off the car windows this morning to get to the radio station. Lion,lamb, lion, lamb.

These are not couplets, though it is national poetry day. I celebrated Joy Harjo and Elizabeth Bishop on the airwaves.

It is 9:30 pm, and the birds are still chirping. I hope we get spring before we burst into summer.

It maybe it is not birds at all, but tree frogs. Peepers; mysteries of spring.

Because mostly I am profoundly grateful to be here, to have taken a leap and come back to the place I spent some of my twenties, and now, entering my sixties. To sit and watch the green things pop out of the ground, to learn that snowdrops are equipped with their own anti-freeze, to see the moon lift to full in the sky, to see it shimmer at half in the morning as it sets—all this fills me with gratitude. My mother got her vaccine earlier today which is such tremendous news, though she had to trek into the city from NJ to do so. Her biggest fear was the walk from the car to the Rite -Aid would prove to be too much, but it was only a block, and she could manage. My brother was there to help her, and at the drugstore, another woman told her she had a very good son, and that her own son would not even talk to her. “I told her I hope that would change,” my mother told me, then repeating the wish.

The mourning doves have started to drag a few twigs to start their first next of the season, though I don’t know if they will do much of anything this week. It is early for them to start. I too am eager to start the garden chores but know I must wait another month. I could start the sweet peas in pots, though I could probably just put the seeds straight in the ground if the soil thaws in two weeks. But I think I’ll try a few, and see what might grow.