It’s coming

Ran home from a few hours of work today to revel in the sunshine and warmth before it fizzles.

First, I spent a frenzied 15 minutes trying to shovel out the front deck. Why? Well, this:

You may not recognize it, but this is the view from the front windows less than a week ago. The hump in your lower left quadrant? A deck, if you can believe it. We’ve had some snow this year. The picnic table out there was not long ago buried up to the benches, the trampoline frame no more than a mysteriously circular balance beam for toddlers, barely aloft over the snowpack.

I suppose this doesn’t explain it all. But you see, I wanted to get OUT to the picnic table, finally bare and welcoming, to read my books in the sun.

Why not use the other doors, you ask?

Yes, well. You see, there is THE CAT to deal with. Yes, that one. So cute. And so very needy.

Whenever I’m outside, the yowling begins. It matters not where the cat IS. He might be emerging from his little chicken house, or the shed, or the neighbor’s shed, but from wherever he prowls, he comes directly to me, and is painfully insistent regarding attention. Yesterday I spent some time out there on the sunny table and had to change clothes and staunch my wounds by the time I came in. He’s a menace.

So you see, the shoveling was in hopes of unstopping the front door, which is out of sight of most of the kitty’s haunts. I figure if I sneak out there all stealthy-like, I might get some time to read without kitty on book and kitty claws in skin. Maybe.

Wasn’t incredibly effective though, the shoveling. That mound has been aging out there for the whole winter, and she was a bit crystalline in her depths. I got a start. Tomorrow’s sun will have it’s work cut out for it if the final layers are to recede low enough for the screen door to open. We shall see.

So after all the huffing, and fending off of the mad kitten with the shovel (such a helper), I trod myself back through my tundra yard, let the cat think I was retreating into the house for good, and then snuck out onto the four square inches of bare deck out back, where sliding glass doors are not hampered by snowbanks, and snowbanks are furthermore retreating themselves, at least those four square inches.

You see it there, between the twin grills, in the space between the sliding glass doors and the tannenbaum-topped snowbanks? My four square inches?

‘Twas lovely. My books and I had a little picka-nicka.

The water is inside because of the cat. Of course. Because he immediately came a’yowling, perched as I was just outside of his coop.

The socks are inside because SUN.

And I am outside, because when the view from the inside out looks like this, the pull is too strong:

That’s it. That’s all there is. The whole of my story leads to nothing more than this tiny beautiful thing called SPRING. 😊

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While we’re here, though, how about those amazing Northern Lights the other night…

If you need me, I’ll be watching the snow melt,
KJ