It comes

This weekend was down to -14C, but the winter's teeth are gone. My woodstove wants to take 18-20 hours to cycle instead of 12. It's 22-25C in the house pretty much all the time. And two days ago was the first time I did chores in 2020 without a shirt (I left my scarf on, my neck has a crick in it, but still).

I celebrated by separating some more African violet pups: Neon Halo, Smooch Me, Tina's April Fantasy, Wizard's Shadowed Lady, Suncoast Paisley Print. They've joined my Izhum, Amulet, Splatter Kake, Afrykanskaia Noch, and Reka Scrverka in real pots. Only 50 or so more tiny pots to go (and of those, honestly, only another ten or twelve are ready to separate). I've been taking them to work and lining them up on the windowsill.

Birds are laying and it just feels good out. I put out a couple nests for the geese; Thea started sleeping in one and the chickens laying in the other. Oh well.

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Some days the past is so far away. Or, as Pablo Neruda-through-Merwin put it: Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

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There doesn't even have to be a moon for the sky to be so bright at night, with stars reflected in snow, that I want to turn off the headlights and drive like part of the night.

In town the smoke from so many woodstoves formed a ceiling just below the streetlights. Even there, through smoke and yellow light, the sky was waiting.

And still this is a world where I won't see darkness for months in the height of summer. They say change is the only constant but: pattern is a constant.

Imagine that I could come to expect this sky?