My April Mood...

A precious rainy day at the pond.

After the strangest March in which we set new records for warm temperatures and dry days, we have finally received a few damp, chill and blustery days that I consider hallmarks of SPRING.

Of course, those odd snow squalls and plummets in temperature are playing havoc with the poor crab apple trees trying their best to bloom, but remarkably I have Lenten Roses and Bleeding Hearts that are quietly blooming in the sanctuary of my Secret Garden.

Lenten Roses, which somehow bloom before I even think to look!

In addition, we have benefited from a few DAYS of RAIN.

When I lived in Ohio, I never took for granted those consecutive days of endless rain, sloppy puddles, dark heavy clouds and winds that would turn my umbrella inside out.  

I was born in Wyoming--where a rainy day was reason to bake cookies and celebrate the sound of liquid non-snow precipitation on the roof!  I didn't even own an umbrella until I moved to Indiana after college.  I even wrote a humorous essay for the newspaper in Purdue about the funny ways people held umbrellas, never having much experience with the etiquette of umbrellas during my youth.

Maybe it's the changeable weather.  Maybe it's the wind blowing in unexpected directions all at once.  Maybe it's barometric pressure or the way that the sun slides across the sky, but I'm in my April Mood.

Rain drops glisten on the brave blooms of the Bleeding Heart.

My April Mood.  

I already cleaned up my gardens for planting because March was so record-breaking warm.  I've sorted drawers and closets.  I've tossed and purged, reorganized and revamped.

With all this changeable energy swirling around me, I'm caught betwixt and between.

Now I'm thinking maybe we should sell the house and move.

Water gurgles around sticks in the Cache la Poudre River during an April rain.

Ken, my darling husband of now 34 years and who has some battlefield experience with my April Moods, was even taken by surprise by this suggestion.

"Move where?," he countered.

Well, he had me on that one.  I'm not sure just where.  I'm not thinking out of state.  Well, maybe.  But, it would be great to have more space--space to breath and to look out and not see my neighbor's driveway so close.  I know I got spoiled living on all those university campuses with no neighbors and more privacy than one might imagine in such a public job.

Rain drops linger on a leaf in my Secret Garden.

Ken, the veteran of April Moods as he is, nodded his head and finally said, "Well, we can at least look."

And, so for the last week or so I've been researching properties online.  We've begun a new relationship with a delightful woman who is a realtor in our neighborhood.  We've learned more about what we have now and what the odds are of finding what we--no, I--have in my head to find.

Space, the final frontier.  How do I find that and a home to compare with what I have now?  I have a Secret Garden, a vista west that includes the Rocky Mountains and a pond humming with life.  I have a gazebo and gardens that bloom in spite of my ineptitude. I'm a short walk to the Cache la Poudre River and minutes to the grocery store. It's a beautiful neighborhood--but, it's a neighborhood and I have found I like my neighbors a bit farther away.  Maybe it's growing up in the wide open high plains.  Maybe the space of university campuses.  Maybe it's silly.  But, maybe it's me.

A "river rose" of some material strategically tucked into the rocks along the banks of the Cache la Poudre River.

An April Mood.  Here.  Not here.  Moving and morphing, blowing with the wind and floating down the river.  A push to start.  A thought to wait.  Create anew?  Begin again?  Let it pass or step inside?  Dark clouds blow in from the west.  Maybe rain.  Maybe not.  But, May will soon be here.