Spring Has…Sprung?

Well, it’s mid-April and Sunday is Easter so I guess it’s Spring now?

I mean, it’s kind of cold and definitely raining and gray and generally “blah” outside, but here I am looking at the calendar and yup…definitely Spring.

I usually count Easter as the beginning of Springtime, likely because of my early indoctrination into the Catholic Church.  I left such organizations many years ago, but I still hold a little solemnity for the Easter Season, from Palm Sunday (when Jesus rode into town on a donkey,) to Good Friday, at least .  Today is Holy Thursday, for those not in the know.  Dinner Party Day, as I like to call it, but most scholars refer to it as The Last Supper, when Jesus gave his apostles the sacrament of the holy communion.  It is “celebrated” by some guy at church washing the feet of other guys at church.  Tomorrow is Good Friday, where nothing good happened, and they crucified a dude for wanting to help the poor, sick, and needy.  (Same sh*t, different millennia, amiright?)  This is celebrated with the Stations of the Cross, which is like an art showing with a terrible audiobook playing in the background.  Then Holy Saturday…which is just a weird one.  See, the apostles held a vigil outside of Jesus’ tomb that day, waiting for his resurrection.  Apparently, they stayed all day, yet still somehow no one was there the next morning to see Jesus come strutting out.  No, Easter morning was when “the women” (including Jesus’ wife, but whatever, Catholic Church,) arrived and found that he was already gone.  Yay Easter!  A celebration of a gruesome death followed by slight confusion!  Wait no…we’re celebrating the resurrection part.  At least, that’s according to my 12^th grade Religion teacher.

But as I said, I’m done with all that.

So instead, I think of my garden.  I just cleaned it out and got it ready, and now I need to do a little weeding and lay some new mulch, and some greenery is already starting to show.  My front lawn is a mud pit, so that will take more time, and the trees remain bare, but I know it is coming.  I know one day soon I will look out the window and see grass and leaves and sunshine, not this windy, cloudy, terrible day I see right now.  After all, April showers do bring May flowers.

So, next week, I guarantee no update for Monday because I am having cataract surgery on my right eye.  If I think of it on Sunday I might write, but don’t expect anything.  I will hopefully be back Thursday to tell you all about it.  In the meantime, I’d appreciate if you took to literally any of my socials and watched the video I made today for my piece “Garbage.”  It recently lost it’s home, and instead of finding it a new one, I have built a house for it on my TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook.  So, I ask you to check it out (@hamneggs716) and share it or like it or leave a comment, because I am letting this little guy fly free out there and it needs all the love it can get. 

So do i.  And well wishes, too.  Big week ahead.

Anyway, that’s all for today.  Happy Monday, my friends.

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Defrosted

Remember that day in school, when the teacher would finally open the windows while you were at lunch and you came back to the classroom to fresh warm air billowing in and it smelled like springtime and freedom?  Then you spent the whole afternoon staring out the window, just waiting for the bell to ring so you could run outside and play with your friends?  That is how today feels.

I am writing this blog, then doing some cleaning, and the truth is I just want to play hooky and go outside and play. 

I want to play in my garden.  I situated my indoor garden last week, and a couple of the friends in there need to head on out to the porch, which I intend to put together this weekend.  I also am in process of murdering some weeds in my front garden while waiting for my perennials to sprout. 

I want to go fishing.  I have been several times this year already but haven’t caught anything.  I want to go down to my favorite spot and plant my chair and cast my new pole and see if some little fishy is venturing up towards the sunlight, like me.

I want to go camping.  I am making that a reality this year.  I want it to be my birthday so we can roll off to the woods for the weekend and spend our time celebrating with family and friends.  I want to go hiking and cook my food on a campfire and lay down under the stars.

I want to have a barbeque.  This is always one of the first true signs of warmer days for me.  I want to get hot dogs and hamburgers and fire up the grill and have a cold beer.

I want to be outside.

Today it is supposed to get to a record 80 degrees here in Buffalo, and I just want to run outside and play. 

So yeah…short blog.  Go play.

Spring Forward

I am currently sitting in my office, my favorite room in the house, which I have just cleaned and smells like roses and peonies because I got a new candle.  The door is wide open and I can feel the sunlight on my back and the fresh air billowing in as I type.  I wonder if a poem will strike.  I don’t expect it today, you see, but soon.  Soon, they will spill forth like they always do when I have shaken off the last of the winter doldrums that I carry with me.

In winter, which I do love for its coziness and holidays and snowy mornings, I find myself unfortunately depressed, as is the case with Seasonal Affect Disorder.  I mean, that’s not a diagnosis I have, I have Major Depressive Disorder which just means I’m depressed no matter the weather.  It is, however, worse in the winter, especially in January and February.  By the middle of March, I often feel as though I am hanging on by a thread, and then-miracle of miracles-we change the clocks back.  A resounding sigh of relief echoes across America. 

Listen, my global community friends, I don’t know what to tell you.  It’s a ridiculous little old rule with no current use and we all hate it.  We are living in miserable agony as we watch 4pm sunsets.  Please bear with us.

Oh, but when we change back!  When we jump forward!

It’s been a week and my sleeping scheduled has already completely changed for the better.  I feel normal again, and it’s like I didn’t even realize it wasn’t normal before.  I feel generally more positive as I soak in as much sunshine as I can.  Today, my legs hurt, but in a good way…not in the “I’ve been on the couch for three days, oh god, I gotta get up and move” way, but in a “I walked several miles this weekend, oh god, I gotta sit down” way.  Because I could.  Because there’s no move flipping snow on the ground, and I don’t mind playing in the mud so long as the sun is out. 

We spent the weekend hitting up some of our favorite fishing spots, and that was nice even though we didn’t catch anything.  It was just good to be outdoors.

And it’s good to have doors to open, like my office door which has sunshine streaming though it right now. 

I sat down to work today for the first time in a long time because I have been so ill.  I mean, yeah, sure, first I cleaned the office because it had become a sort of staging ar4ea for other stuff in the house while I was out.  But then I sat down to type, my list of tasks for the day beside me, and I started this blog. I thought, for a moment, that I caught a whiff of a poem, so I stopped and popped over to my poetry file for a moment, but nothing came. It ebbs and flows, but I feel it rising.  I have many creative pursuits planned during my recovery time, and I hope that working on some new poems falls into that plan as well.

In the meantime, the old poems: an update.

Still out here trying to sell A Lovely Wreckage.

Furthermore, still querying (Un)Requited.  I received a LOVELY rejection the other day.  The first.  Essentially, they said it was great but didn’t fit the catalogue, which I kind of figured when I looked though their offerings.  However, chapbook presses are few and far between, so you can count on that baby ending up in your inbox at some point if you are even remotely interested in publishing chapbooks.

Meanwhile, its been “in-progress” on Submittable at another place since mid-January, so finger’s crossed.

So, good weather makes me think of poems, but apparently can’t just make me create them on the spot.  Which is fine.  I will wait.  Things are only just starting to grow, anyway.

Doldrums

Today is a gloomy day. There have been a great many gloomy days lately, as mother nature rained down on us all spring long, bringing life to plants but also death to plans.  Now it is finally summer, and one would think those gloomy days are past, yet here we are.  As I type I hear the pitter patter of rain against the steel door and am reminded that I am depressed.

Only vaguely, the way I get when the weather is poor or during the winter when I haven’t seen the sun in days.  I can’t stand those times, the grayness seeping into my skin and making me shiver.  I write but I don’t want to, as is often the case on these gray days, when all I really want to do is curl up in bed with a book or lie on the sofa and watch television.  Today I am pushing myself to be happy, as M is here for a few days and I am determined to keep a smile on my face for him.  I am so proud of him right now, for personal reasons, but let it be known that he is an amazing and wonderful young man and I can’t wait to see the future that lies ahead of him.  But I don’t want to be sad around him.  So, this morning when I felt the world getting on top of me, I offered him a PlayStation remote and went out for a walk to clear my head. 

I passed a lot of gardens, as my street has several front lawns blooming with all sorts of plants.  I considered taking pictures, but the owners of these gardens likely would have objected to me traipsing around and photographing their hard work.  I heard a lot of birds, and lawnmowers.  I saw people on their way to work and school.  I saw garbage men filling up their truck.  I saw two ducks just hanging out on McKinley Pkwy.  I got some spell energy from a greenhouse on Wizards Unite.  I felt better.

I personally cannot wait until mid-July, when we head out on our first ever family camping trip.  Spending time outside always makes me feel better, and to spend three days with nothing but nature is something I am really looking forward to.  There’s still a ton of planning to be done and I am going to have to piece together supplies from various people, but I can’t wait to spend time with my parents, Mark and the kiddos out in nature.  Something about it takes away the doldrums, even if it were to rain on our little trip.  At least we would be together and could keep one another entertained. 

The drizzle is letting up, and the sun keeps daring to make an appearance, but no matter the weather I will try to keep a smile on my face, and look for the little gifts that the world has given me to get me by in the meantime.  Like gardens, and ducks, and the smell of air after the rain.   That’s enough to keep me going, today.

Return of the Birds

The other day Mark turned the volume off on the television and hushed me.  Automatically, I assumed we were playing “name that song,” a game we often enjoyed given that our downstairs neighbor is something of a musician.  “I don’t hear anything.”

“The birds!  The birds are back!”

This wasn’t news to me, as I had heard the little fellows a day or two beforehand.  One of my favorite parts of the year is when the leaves finally appear on the trees, but there’s something to be said for the return of the birds.

Coinciding with their arrival, I happened to open a word file that has a halfway decent story in it.  As I read, two things occured to me.  At one point, I forgot that I was reading my own words, which has always been a sign to me that something I’ve written is actually good, and I realized that one of the plot points in the story are birds.  These thoughts connected in my mind; the new tweeting I hear outside my window, and the fact that I happened to open a story where the first line speaks of a chirping bird.  Somehow, to me, it’s a sign of good tidings.

I’ve always liked birds.  They remind me of my grandmother, who loves them, and who would tell me the names of all the birds in her yard when I was young.  She particularly likes hummingbirds, and had a feeder hanging in out back for most of my life.  One time, she found a petrified bird in the attic.  Everyone thought it was gross except for me, who suggested we paint it with glitter and hang it on the Christmas tree.  My grandmother found this to be hilarious while others found it disgusting.  Obviously, she gets me.

I also like birds because they are the remnants of dinosaurs.  I like to imagine them 30 feet tall and without feathers. I said this to M one day and watched his eyes grow wide with fear.  “But dude, you love Godzilla.”

“Godzilla is not a giant BIRD.”

The kid makes a fair point.

What the return of the brds really symbolizes to me is a sense of renewed hope.  Spring is coming, and they are the minstrels that hearken it.  Soon the grass will turn green, the flowers will bloom, and the leaves will bud on the trees.  The cold, dark winter is ending, and life can start anew.  I think each of us can appreciate that.