Today is a dreary day, a damp, foggy day. Yesterday it rained, and everything is still wet. The forecast is for a warm day, a 60° day, and I’m hopeful. I did have a wonderful surprise, a spring surprise, when I went to get the papers. It drove the dreariness away. My hyacinths have bloomed. The garden has pink, purple and lilac flowers. This morning my garden is a delight.

My father always planted flowers in the small garden in front of the picture window by the front door. Usually they were pansies. They looked like a Disney cartoon, a musical with singing and dancing pansies. All the flowers have faces and are wearing bonnets. Their colors are bright yellow, purple, pink and blue. They have skinny legs. They have high pitched, squeaky voices and sing of spring.

Yesterday morning was busy. I had my uke lesson, went to the dump and shopped at Agway. Yesterday afternoon I took a nap. As for today, my dance card is empty.

I always think of winter as stubborn, resolute maybe, and quiet. Spring is loud. The mornings are filled with bird songs. Yards are being spring cleaned to the sounds of mowers and leaf blowers. They always start early in the morning. The kids down the street wake from their winter hibernation. They shoot baskets at the hoop in their front yard. I can hear the bounces of the basketball on the street and the kids’ voices when they score. The younger kids ride their bikes up and down the street. The drabness of winter disappears. The gardens scream color.

I love when I can open the windows to let the sweet spring air blow away the stale air of winter. The house smells clean and new.

When I shop this time of year, I always buy yellow dafs, the harbingers of spring. They brighten the kitchen and the den, the two rooms where I spend the most time.

Spring is sweatshirt weather. The jackets and fleece are put away for another year. Even on a coldish day I won’t go back to winter garb. Corduroy has had its season. I’m wearing sneakers instead of my winter Uggs. Yesterday it was my tie-dye Converse high tops.

This morning I’m wearing sandals and socks but in the house where only I can see them. I always think of socks with sandals as an odd combination. The socks are winter and the sandals are summer. The wearer should pick one or the other.

Though it may be a cloudy day, it is warm, 59°, and it may hit 60°. Spring is in the air today. It is sweatshirt weather.

When I was a kid, I lived in the same town where I was born. We lived in a duplex in the project. The project was loaded with kids, a few my age but most around my sisters’ ages. There was a parking lot at the top of the hill, but no one parked there so we used to skate on the empty lot. Back then my skates were attached to my shoes and tightened with a key. I never wore sneakers when roller skating because the skates didn’t stayed attached to the sneaker sides. I used to love the feeling on the soles of my feet through my shoes when I skated on the tar in the lot. Sometimes I was brave enough to skate down the sidewalk from the top of the hill to my house, halfway down the hill, but if I went too fast, I’d get scared and throw myself on the grass beside the sidewalk, but once in a while, despite my heroic efforts, I’d fall on the sidewalk. I’d scrape my knees or my elbows or both.

When I was young, I’d eat things I’d never eat now, and now I eat things I’d never have touched back then. Sardines roil my stomach if I see them now in the open can side by side head to tail. The idea that they were a go to snack for me gives me the chills. I’d munch them on Saltines. On Fridays during Lent we didn’t eat meat. On some Fridays we’d have formerly frozen fish sticks and fries. I remember the crispy fish sticks were white inside. I have no idea the sort of white fish they were, and I don’t remember their taste. I don’t eat frozen fish now. I can’t even remember the last time I did.

My palate expanded, especially in Ghana. I ate goat, fish with heads, hummus, Guinea fowl, Indian food and local foods like cassava, garden eggs and plantain. On my trip through South America, I ate ceviche and in Ecuador I ate what I found out later was guinea pig. In Finland I just pointed at the food I wanted as I didn’t speak Finnish, and the second language there is Swedish. Most of the time my eyes chose well.

If you’ve been around a while, you know I don’t beans except green beans which aren’t really beans to me. I find kidney beans disgusting. Even the name is disgusting. Baked beans, nope. Lima beans are gross. My chili never has beans. Retired beans look like something expelled by a baby at one end or the other. I don’t even sing the bean song.