Pilgrims!

You remember the kid joke -- April showers, May flowers...

Another beautiful morning. Hard to believe spring is finally here. Oh, it always arrives in the same untimely fashion. Something in the wiring of the human brain that allows us to forget each year how bad the winter can be makes the spring brand new again each April.

I keep thinking each spring is the first spring – a nod to Cat Stevens and his breaking morning, in some fashion.

This year, the pear trees amaze me most. Decorative, not fruit-bearing pears, it would seem, suddenly awaken every side street, yard after yard. Surely there was a transition between barrenness and full and glorious white blossoms. But I didn't see it.

The last couple weeks have been hard for me – got over a lingering cold-slash-sinus infection-slash-hacking asthmatic's cough in the midst of cold rainy weather. It sent me into a depression spiral for a couple weeks. This too has past, as they always do – due this time in no small part to the cacophony of blooms flourishing thanks to the dark weeks of rain.

There are blossoms on bushes that never blossomed before. Maybe they weren't mature enough in the past, several of us have commented. I keep coming back to the damp and the rain. Without the rain, would those rare blooms exist?

I'd rather not have those down, damp rainy times in my emotional life either. I'd much prefer 65 and sunny with a gentle breeze year-round. I'd like to claim to emerge fresh, green and renewed like the spring earth.

What it gives me, though the mental grey sky, is an appreciation for the small blossoms – mundane, the small victories of every day: getting out for a cup of coffee, freshly folded laundry, chopped vegetables and baked chicken, a dandy-lion bouquet in a plastic glass.

That's not profound. And in the amazing outburst of life and spring, a few blossoms on an otherwise ordinary bush are hardly notable. But I'll enjoy them more for the rain.