It rained heavily while everyone was here for Thursday game night. I turned off the heat and opened the windows for fresh air and soothing noise. (It stayed warm in here with six bodies and the residual heat of a brick house with a tile floor, heated by hot water pipes.) Then, not "seemlingly" overnight but actually so, it was suddenly green out back. Okay, the grass was noticeably greener over half the yard, not in the damaged, muddy spots that three dogs created. I would have taken pictures of that part, but it just wasn't all that pretty yet. However, after our neighbor took us around the corner for burgers, and then I got dropped off while the guys went to Boulder, I noticed there was not only an increase in the green out front, there was also a lot of purple. Crocuses have begun to bloom, interspersed among tons of tiny lupine leaves emerging all around the garden. There are tulips emerging, and the iris spikes that never really turned fully brown over the winter are looking like a more hardy green. It's still early yet to rake up all the decaying leaves, but soon we will be out trimming back the last remnants of dead flower stalks. The hen and chicks are perking up in maroon glory through their muddy blankets of leaves, and the tips of the lilacs are fat and starting to burst. Even the nectarine tree is covered in swelling bumps all over. The only sad little holdout right now is the winecrisp apple tree that appears to have fully succumbed to the blight that ate at it the last two years. I will win the battle to replace it this year. I am determined to do so, even if it means my busted back is out there wielding a shovel.
I wanted winter, but we really didn't get one. The snowpack map looks awful right now. Up north, the water equivalent is between 70 and 80 percent of normal, roughly, and the further south you go, the worse it gets. In the area around Four Corners and the big fruit growing areas around Palisade, it's under 50 percent. This is bad. I can only hope we have a wet spring, or we are in serious trouble for fire season. Maybe we can have a lot of heavy snows in April. Hope for us, please.
I'm not going out to party for St Patrick's Day. It was never one of my big holidays. In fact, the last time I remember really trying to go out and celebrate was with my college best friend whose family was truly Irish, and I had to drink iced tea because by then I suspected I was pregnant with my first child (I was right). The Mr has taken my car out to drive revelers around, and he's hoping to be able to stay much closer to home, doing short hops taking drunks a few blocks between bars and their houses rather than doing long, cross-country, metro-spanning drives. I don't miss the bar scene. Not at all. And I certainly don't need to be someplace where green beer is being sloshed all over the place. I'm not even going to pour a wee dram of Irish whisky. I don't need it. What I need is sleep, since I got none to speak of last night. (After three hours of interrupted snoozing, I ended up sitting in the dark, burning up what was left of my phone battery discovering that there is a website dedicated to different versions of Jesus Christ Superstar, with pictures from the original London cast starring my childhood celebrity crush Paul Nicholas, and there was a movie done in 2000 with Rik Mayall as Herod. Ah, the things that insomnia teaches us.) If I need any recognition of this saint's day, I'll go wear shamrock socks with my jammies that I'm about to don. Close enough.
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