It's Saturday, and I'm awake too early after a spate of ominous house-repair dreams, but oh well. The coffee is hot and fresh and we were planning an early outing anyway--a diner breakfast in Biddeford and then a walk among the salt marshes to check out the spring bird migration.

Even in near dark, the neighborhood tumbles with bird song: cardinals shrilling in the maples, a white-throated sparrow sam-peabodying, robins chortling on the ragged lawns, and somewhere a small woodpecker drilling out his breakfast.

Yesterday, as I paused between fights with my garden hose, I looked up into the trees and thought, Were those buds open five minutes ago? Spring is unfolding so quickly. The cherry blossoms tremble in a sandpaper breeze, and my heart cracks open at the sight of such pure beauty. 

I cleaned the house yesterday, even polished some furniture, opened a window, argued with some weeds. I hung out sheets and towels, and all day long they shimmied in the windy sunshine. I mixed up bread dough for pizza, I read about Patrick Bronte's peculiar rise from Irish farm boy to Cambridge-educated evangelical, I thought about poems, I received an email with a blurb for my new book that made me cry, "gorgeous echoes of Plath and Celan," it said, and I cried, and I wrote nothing, I ambled among the neighborhood streets, spotting the first spikes of lily-of-the-valley in other people's gardens, I found a milk-white narcissus in my own backyard, I sat on my ugly front stoop with my handsome cat and listened to the empty street, everyone else somewhere else, at work, at school, as I idled with the cat and my hiccupy sentimental tears, because someone had read my book and called it "stupendous," because my mind was a run-on sentence, because this is the springtime of my sixtieth year and, gosh, I've been around for a while, haven't I, so how is it that the world can still feel brand new?