This week is whipping past, I suppose because I've been on the road for a third of it and disrupted from my home schedule. It's hard to believe it's Thursday already--not that I'm complaining, because Thursday is writing-with-my-poets night and that is always good. But I do feel slightly breathless about time.

I did see a snowdrop yesterday, just a single bud, hoisting itself from the slush. And today we'll have rain, so I expect to be spotting more very soon. My own gardens are still buried in snow, but after the next few days of rain they, too, may start showing their colors.

Everywhere on my walk yesterday the neighborhood cardinals were singing, woodpeckers were hammering, crows were sailing, bluejays were plundering. The birds are busy, busy, and the squirrels are rushing across the snowy yards, skittering up the fat trunks of the maples, their mouths stuffed with leaves--repairing their nests, getting ready for babies.

And the sky is a wild rush--sun and breeze and cloud. Sand skitters in the gutters, and dogs tug at their leashes, and teenagers insist on wearing miniskirts to school, and poets pull off their knitted hats and let their heads be cold because the air is too exhilarating to resist.