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Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Seasons

Fall is my favorite season with it's crisp cool mornings and warm sunny afternoons, the smell of dried leaves and woodburning stove smoke tinting the air. I love putting on a cozy sweatshirt and sitting around a fire with good friends. I love waking up in the morning to the house being freezing cold from leaving the doors and windows open all night, and snuggling into my warm sunshine-covered bed with my family. I love the turning colors of fall and the hope for the first beautiful, magical snow fall.

Many of the things I love about fall are the same things I love about spring. Spring is my second favorite season. It used to be my very favorite, but it typically contains so many days of gray that it's a bit depressing for me. When I am so anxious to see the first tips of my spring bulbs poking through and I just see gray-brown ground instead, it's almost too much for me to bear. When I go walking in the woods in search of some early-blooming Hepatica, Bloodroot, or Spring Beauty and find only beds of dry leaves with no sign of these precious spring wonders, I am discouraged.

However, there is something Spring does bring that makes it my favorite time of year. It brings me a heart full of new ideas, hopes, and plans. It makes me want to purge all the things I don't need in my life so I can concentrate on what is really important to me - both physically and mentally. It's a time for me to go through the cupboards top to bottom and pack up what we don't need and get rid of it. It's a time for garage sales and picnics and sheets that were hung to dry on the clothesline. It's a time to clear out everything that causes stress or clutter so that I can walk out of the house in the morning and not return until bedtime and not worry that the dishes didn't get done or the pillows didn't get picked up off the floor.

With spring comes rain. It's inevitable. But why is it that when it rains, we hole up inside our houses and get grumpy? I remember when I was a kid and it would start raining, we couldn't wait to get outside. We "swam" in our mucky pond in the rain, we built forts in the rain, we "swam" in the ditch alongside our road in the rain. At that time in my life, the road my parents live on was a country road. We knew every car that traveled down our road and some days you could go half the day without ever seeing a car go by. It's very different now, but what a place we had to play! We loved playing outside in the rain. Something must change when we "grow up" that makes us not like the rain. Gavin loves the rain!

When life gives you rain,
Play soccer in it!



(while Mom stays dry under the cover of the front porch and uses the zoom lens
to take pictures of you before ducking back inside the warm house!) 






...and for goodness sake - pull up your hat so you can see where you're going before you run right into a tree!  :)

So... the rain came on Monday - and we played in it... as we all should.

(sorry these pics below were taken with my phone)




Gavin doesn't mind getting wet, he just loves to play with umbrellas!

Then yesterday the sun came,

and it was 63 degrees outside!

We opened all of the windows and doors and let the cool breeze blow through the house.

We put fresh sheets on the beds and we vacuumed everything. It felt so good!

It sure feels like spring is here.

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