| 16 march 2001 New lid is up! Go get your poetry fix.
| beee-yoootiful day in the neighborhood The site is propagated to the new web host. They say that three times is the charm. I guess we'll see about that, eh? Looking for a web host? Okay, here my experience was that tech support speaks minimal English, and the site may or may not be up consistently). In fairness, the last host did finally refund me my money for unused time, so I removed their link from here. Let's hope they don't get hacked again, for their sake. I'll let you know about them in time. Anyway, things are definitely looking up here in the Den. The days are getting longer, and the sun rises early enough so that I can take a nice walk instead of shuffling off to the gym. I'm lucky to live between both the Downtown Strollway and Hanes Park, so either way I get to watch the sun rise in the relative silence of a young day. Spring blindsides you here. Now you don't see it, now you do. I was walking home one afternoon last week and looked up to see tiny buds on a tree across the street. They were about a day old, if that. By Saturday, they had become small white flowers, and by today the top ones have burst into light green leaves. Daffodils have sprouted in countless front yards. Bright yellow forsythia bushes line area roads. It's warm and breezy. It won't last long. Chicago had long, sadistic Spring seasons. It seemed that way from my perspective, anyway. Here in North Carolina, you just kind of wake up one week and it's time to put on shorts. No long winter goodbyes, no siree. It's time to pack up the sweaters, shove them into the storage closet, and slap on the sunscreen. Chicago, on the other hand, teases you mercilessly. You never really know if you'll be wearing a jacket into June, or under some emergency heat wave health order to stay indoors. Buds linger before becoming leaves and flowers. I would wear shorts in 55-degree weather and sprout nary a goosebump. It was tropical compared to months of wind chill and snow drifts as high as my car. Sometimes, we get a March or early April blizzard here in Winston-Salem. Within three days, you're in shorts again. I can live with that. When Spring comes, I can't eat much for about a week. My stomach gets all jumpy, like before a date. I become infatuated with the days to come. I drink a lot of water and breathe more deeply. I watch my freckles pop out from their winter rest. We bloom, too. |
