Two warm days, before the cold returns

 Yesterday, on a walk with Kathleen and a neighbor, we passed a house with a yard full of crocuses to which bees were giving their attention. 

Daffodils are visible on the south side of our house, though they have not yet bloomed. 

That morning, standing out a window at five, I saw a mature red fox trot down the sidewalk in front of the house.

On a walk this morning, I saw that the maple tree at the bottom on the hill next to the bridge over Herring Run was preparing to come out in bloom, and the deciduous magnolias on the west side of our house are about to follow suit with the first of their messy droppings. 

Also this morning, the neighborhood was full of robins, which I expect will soon swarm over our holly tree to consume the berries, as they do every year. 

This year I will not be at The Sun's offices at Port Covington to witness the blooming of the locust trees at the back of the property, or smell their fragrance to remind me of my childhood in Kentucky.

The rain is beginning now, and the thunderstorms  and cold front are on the way, but I have had two days to sit on the porch in fair weather to read in a book Daniel Okrent's posts as public editor of The New York Times, raising issues for journalism that remain current, and reading on my cellphone dispatches from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which also tell an old story that has not gone away. 

Spring in the third year of the pandemic will come, though I want it to come faster. I hope that The Sun will husband its strength under its new corporate owner and that The Baltimore Banner will soon launch as a fresh journalistic voice for the city. I hope that Ukraine will survive the brutal battering that is coming and that the West will help preserve it. 

I want to see the robins eat those holly berries and show me that life sustains.