A pretty forsythia on Pleasant Street, North Sydney.

Me at the St. Ann’s Bay look off, early May.

A paragraph from one of my favourite books, a paragraph about the glory of springtime that drives me mad with outdoor-fever:

“On the new edge of springtime when I stand on the front porch shading my eyes from the weak morning light, sniffing out a tinge of green on the hill and the scent of yawning earthworms, oh, boy, then ! I roll like a bear out of hibernation. The maple buds glow pink, the forsythia breaks into its bright yellow aria. These are the days when we can’t keep ourselves indoors around here, any more than we believe what our eyes keep telling us about the surrounding land, i.e., that it is still a giant mud puddle, now lacking its protective covering of ice. So it comes to pass that one pair of boots after another run outdoors and come back mud-caked — more shoes than we even knew we had in the house, proliferating like wild portobellos in a composty heap by the front door. So what? Noah’s kids would have felt like this when the flood had almost dried up: muddy boots be hanged. Come the end of the dark days, I am more than joyful. I’m nuts.”

-Page 43, “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life,” by Barbara Kingsolver.