It's late and things are finally mostly quiet around Smith Park West. There was a lot of rambunctious noise throughout the day, but now all I hear are the sounds of Harvey killing and eating something with wings that came in while the doors were open, Athena marching around the main floor singing the strains of an epic poem to describe her exploits of the day, and the occasional car driving way too fast on my street. I have completely unwound, and I'm in the process of just letting this day drain out through my skin, never to be remembered in the grand scheme of my life. We had time to be loud, to rile up the teenager just because it was easy, to shop, to entertain, and to relax. I'm still miles behind on my to-do list, and I just don't want to worry about it before bedtime.
Spring comes much later to the Front Range than it does most of the country. I've been watching people on TV standing in front of trees that blossomed and leafed out weeks ago, and they've already swapped out to their warm weather wardrobes. It has only been in the last week that I got serious about spring, and stopped watching the weather report for one last snowstorm. It's still possible there's one more to come, maybe even after Mother's Day, but I feel comfortable behaving as if they're done. It's time to put plants outside (but only in containers, just in case), to think about removing snow tires for regular ones, and to purchase my first pair of capri pants of the year. (I change sizes so often with my disease and the medications that treat it, it seems more relevant to purchase than to dig shorts out of a drawer and hope for comfort.)
My lilacs aren't quite far enough along to bloom yet, but the one just on the neighbor's side of the fence is really opening up. It smells great on that side of the house, even if it is a little reminiscent of an old lady's bath salts. The chokecherry has just unfurled a few random white blossoms, like watching the first kernels of popcorn open in the oiled based of an old-fashioned electric popper. The tart cherries up front haven't flowered yet, but they'll be along soon. The house smells weird, and I haven't figured out whether it's a legitimate kind of weird, or the combination of all of the different stages of trees flowering in sequence. The scent defies categorizing. I just wish I could remember whether this happened exactly this way last year. If only there were a way I could reach back, and see what I was thinking at the end of April last year, or the year before, or the year before that...
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