easter and not spring

It's not spring here. The only things we have coming up are the crocuses and the bare pointed tips of the tulip leaves just an inch above the dirt. The trees are still brown and naked, the nights cold. Sometimes in the day it gets up to 50 and you can take off your coat if you're standing in the sun and no wind, but mostly it's some odd place between winter and spring, the world just waiting.

The easter bunny came here of course, but only brought minimal candy. We're pretty strict about that stuff and it's funny to me that I'm that parent. Frances's emotions can be so volatile and sugar only makes things more difficult, so we dole it out in tiny increments. We went to a Unitarian church we're trying out, and then home for lunch and naps. Other than that, it's a regular day here--sunny, colder than it looks, quiet. Mitch is working at the kitchen table and I'm straightening up. It's odd to be here easter without family, with no where to go or gather, and I wonder what our family traditions will turn out to be. I miss my grandmother's house at easter, everything in bloom, standing outside in a light sweater, all my uncles and cousins charging after hidden eggs in the yard, greens and ham inside on the stove.

Last fall I met someone originally from Greensboro and she told me it wasn't the winter that she missed about NC, it was the spring. At the time I thought spring was spring and I didn't understand, but now I do. In North Carolina it goes from being winter to spring overnight, the world leaping alive with surprising colorful insistence. Here I suspect it will be a forward and backward kind of movement, a slow gaining that perhaps isn't even noticeable until we're completely in it. It could still be a ways off.