Mar. 28, 2006 - 18:01 MST

AMNESTY

Riding with the car windows down today while doing errands. What a grand feeling that gives me, my time of year is rapidly approaching.

There is a Daffodil in full bloom in the bed on the west side of the house and leaves of future Tulips coming up. The Lilac bush has some limber places and buds of leaves beginning to show, the hedge has leaf buds too. The grass is greening around the edges where the warm sidewalk encourages growth.

In my shirtsleeves I soak in the sun and warm breeze and think back to the days of my childhood when each bit of green coming along after a cold, cold winter made my heart beat with excitement. I knew not of gardening, nor agriculture or botany, I just knew that all this was a sign that soon warm zephyrs would play and muss my hair and the lawns would be overcome with green. That's all I knew, and it was enough.

I don't really know much more today, but it is still enough.

Of course, this is the Denver area and snow and cold can still happen. When snow comes at this time of year it is very wet and super heavy causing much damage to trees, shrubs and killing all chances of much in the way of flowers if it gets very cold after the snowfall.

But, that's life, we know it is possible and pray for the best.

This means for me that I will come out of the baleful dusk of SAD. Even though I am off medication for over a year and reasonably serene, still SAD casts a pall over my winter.

A resurgence of spirit and joy is upon me and I am happy.

About this time of year when I was a kid, flights of birds would be going overhead to the north, nowadays we see the mating chase in town as many of the formerly migrating birds winter here.

And about this time of year the whistle of the trains headed south along Santa Fe Drive would lose their dismal, mournful sound, the wail of despair lingering, lingering. And would become just the sound of a train passing. No longer sounding as if the locomotive would come through the house with all its fire and steam, but just passing by a few blocks away.

The people from the Parks Department will be soon making their plantings in order to bring the joy of blooming flowers along the way and in the parks. Denver can be so pretty in the Spring, folks shrubs singing their songs of beauty, Forsythia loudly spouting cheer and daffs singing chorus.

Someone is strumming my heart strings and thrilling me to the core. And I feel that there is again in this world AMNESTY . . . . . . . .

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