It is sunshiney and bright and warm and springy and I'm in love with my little neighborhood today. This is not a perfect place--it's got some sketchy houses, and sketchy streets, and weird people standing around and I might have heard it called the ghetto, once or twice, but it doesn't look like the ghetto to me. Not my street, with the lined-up trees doing that exploding-into-life thing that they do, come the change of seasons, and the park all green and flowery and the sun and the shade and the heat and the light and the so-pretty houses designed by students of Frank Lloyd Wright (that is a true fact!) and the fact that it is just a perfect day, and on a perfect day, you love everything and every one.

I went for a run this morning, for the first time in about a week, and it nearly killed me, but I was smiling all goofy, the way I tend to, because everything was just so pretty and it was so warm and perfect and mild and maybe I couldn't breathe, but I would die on a perfect day (instead of a rainstorm, and that's so completely okay).

When I finished up, I crossed the street, came up my stairs and sat down for a minute, on the stoop, because it was too beautiful to go in. It was far too entirely beautiful to go in, so I leapt back up and walked down to the store for milk, going around the long way to the other park, looping through and around and back down. In the store, back out quickly, blinking at how bright it was, and warm.

I wish I had brought a book, because I would have liked to have thrown myself on the grass and let the milk spoil and let my skin spoil while I soak up vitamin D because it does not matter, cancer and wrinkles and spots, when it feels this good, right? Possibly, that is a slippery slope and the application of that logic to just any situation a very poor idea without careful consideration and forethought, except it's a warm and sunny spring day, and I am okay without thinking, fore or aft.

Eventually, I had to come back inside, because there are responsibilities to be responsible about and work to do and tasks to check off. But I've got the front door open, and the cat is sitting in the sun, watching people go by and meowing at them because he is obnoxious. The faster I finish up, the more quickly I can get back out there with a book and a blanket and an apple. I am determined not to miss this season, this blink in the weather before it gets desert-hot and the earth is crisped brown and it hurts to breathe or open your eyes or think. I do not deal very well with the heat. Winter and I are only nodding acquaintances, Summer and I are not friends. The spring, though...you may not have noticed, but I kind of want to have the spring's babies. I think I may be coming down with something.