Twitterpated

Uli:   Mama, do you love me?

Me:   I do, Sweetheart. I love you with all my heart!

Uli:    {nods & shrugs}  I love bananas.

March is over. It came in growling, its slumpy dark clouds and rain smashing my spring is near mood back down to less than joyful. Then the record-breaking eighty degree warmth roasted us all out of our sweaters and had us burrowing under our beds to rediscover our winter-banished shorts and tanks. At the same time it dashed the maple syrup industry's opportunities and squeezed the apple trees' blossoms out from the trees tips many weeks too soon, setting the farmers all aflutter (and creating some not insignificant a-fears). Even as the crocuses bloomed and we swatted the year's first mosquitoes, the threat of a last horrifying frost lingered in the back of everyone's minds. (And continues to linger.)

The last few days of March looped back to seasonally-appropirate gloom and damp, but left us with the hunger for summer. Forget spring, summer will be here before you know it! Summer, my true love. Or, if you're not me, then perhaps March shocked you by presenting summer far too soon and you're now thankful for the retreat back into regular spring. April's clouds, rain, mud:  they make you happy because they don't require sitting in front of a fan sipping iced tea though what's wrong with that I just don't know.

Uli embraces this novel non-snow-covered world with her whole soul, gathering and arranging the pinecones (illicitly gathered from the neighbor's yard, though I dare say Nancy wouldn't mind) and snapping flowers off by the head to present to Mama (sweet, though what do you do with ten stemless blooms a day?). I watch her attempt to scramble up trees after the squirrels, scoop garden rocks out of the beds to create towers on the steps, and shiver with the excitement of holding a slug and I remind myself that though it means muddy shoes and sweaty hair that she is very anti-washing I'm witnessing a child falling in love (again) with the outdoors.

It makes me smile. It makes me fall in love with my daughter that much more.

~TPropson