Spring Has Come! (I Think)

We Pacific Northwesterners know that spring here is a giddy sixteen-year-old girl getting ready for her first date. She takes forever to do her hair, does her makeup and then wipes it clean so many times she's lost count, and changes her outfit every thirteen seconds.

On the first day of spring, there was wind. Lots of wind. Shrieking, clawing, window-rattling wind. And when the wind managed to blow itself away for eight minutes, there was blue. Blue and this eerie, cautious watery light.

The little string bean hogging my sunshine

The second day of spring brought the fiercest hailstorm I can remember in years. Sharp, stinging pellets that covered the grass like snow. Which was fitting because on the third day of spring we had snow. An inch of it (which was, I'll have you know, an inch more than we got all winter). It was like some sick start-of-spring prank: let Olivia wake up to a winter wonderland an infuriating three months after Christmas. Not a single damn white Christmas in my life, but hey, now I can cross "snow on March 22nd" off my wish-list.

Since then we've had some showers, but mostly we've had SUN. Of course here, once the mercury hits 60 we all throw open our windows and stuff our sweatshirts into storage--until, of course, we wake up in the morning again to this:

But it's been in the mid-60s all this week, which is practically tropical for us this time of year. We've been promised 70 degrees on Sunday, so, you know, good for us.