I’m in Chicago for the weekend visiting my niece. (Part of the purpose of the trip was to deliver these kitchen stools by Steve, and father and daughter shared the paper over breakfast this morning.)
The cold followed me here, but it feels good to be where things are blooming. The tulips are up, the lilacs are out and the rain has made everything lush and green. The line for trees with leaves on them was basically Menomonie, Wisconsin. North and west of there, everything was still grey, but south and east, spring had arrived in all its glory.
There was a woman in the creative writing program at Sarah Lawrence with me named Annie Lanzilotto who had grown up in the Bronx. When a very wealthy woman in the program (whose “job” was managing her family money to make sure they were invested in socially conscious stocks) said her family money came from oil, Annie said, “My father was in oil, too!” When she received a disbelieving look, she said, “It was right on the side of the truck, Lanzilotto Oil. Heating oil, that is. Annie was very smart and talented and had gotten through Brown University while fighting non-Hodgkins lymphoma. 
When I told Annie I’d gone to college in Iowa, her eyes widened. “Iowa is where I learned about the colors green-yellow and yellow-green. Those were two crayons in my box of 64 that I never used. But I was on a bike ride in Iowa (possibly RAGBRAI), and everywhere I saw fields that were green-yellow and yellow-green. I’d wondered where those colors were.
Well, on the way to Chicago I saw lots of those two colors. And once here, I was treated to a whole rainbow more. Before I left, I put together the e-newsletter for the retreat house where I work. I looked everywhere for a photo of something that wasn’t grey or brown and dead. The day I was going to send it out, I saw that the crocuses had bloomed in a couple little batches along the walkway to our prayer space. And so it begins.
(I’d hoped to post a photo of the prairie coming in where we burned it. It is another very hopeful sign, as after a couple days of rain, all sorts of green sprouts have come up. And walking around, they mostly look like flowers and native grasses, not as many weeds as before… alas, my adapter isn’t working here so it will have to wait.)
