Welcome home forever once again.

Spring's not technically here, but I always think it starts with March anyway. Even if it snows again, it's going to be feeble halfhearted snow that melts quickly and featherdusts the bones but doesn't get down deep. If you stand outside at midday, you can hear the trickle of little melts springing up like leaks in the belly of a barge. Winter's funereal barge. The unspoken promise is mud, and the smell of autumn's dead things finally decaying. Old grass, old leaves getting out of the way. The sharp edges of the air smooth out, fill up with smell and sound and color. Precipitation speeds up, is fuller and faster and wetter and scrubs at dirt instead of covering it up. Things happen, we lurch out of a stillness we may not have even noticed. The word that's overused is "quickening."

I came back from South Africa mid-march last year. I landed in the Twin Cities on a day when winter was fighting hard for a comeback, and then decided to hang out for a few days with my friend who lived there. That was terrible, a legitimate bitter cold. Coming from a summer hemisphere, I had no proper jacket, and spent a lot of time in a borrowed hoodie worrying about losing my fingers. But the sun was so bright that it didn't really matter, and the buds on the trees flashed their neon every whichaway.