I spent a good amount of time outdoors this glorious first weekend of spring. Saturday afternoon, we wandered down to the Georgetown waterfront and sat and read and talked and ate snacks. Rudi made homemade pizza and we feasted on my cake (we’re down to a slice each tomorrow). I looked through some photos and sent some off to friends, so they could enjoy them, too.

Today it was so warm I was able to go to the farmers market in a tshirt and with bare legs. After a tasty late breakfast, I traveled over to Capitol Hill, where one of the nurseries I like is found. I picked up a couple of strawberry starts, as well as some other plants, and then got in touch with Sarah, who lives nearby. We checked out a new ice cream place and spent an hour sitting in the sun chatting. I metro’ed back to our side of town and decided to stop by the garden while there was still light and plant some of my new seedlings. I got two herbs, two salad greens, and a container of baby leeks into the ground before the sun slipped low enough I decided to call it quits.

The evening was spent watching the UConn women with Rudi, reading, knitting the toe decreases on my sock (I just have to kitchener the second sock and weave in the ends tomorrow!), painting my nails, drinking cocoa, and doing a little rearranging.

How was your weekend?

Wishing you all a truly happy spring with the opportunity to be outside and together with those you love.

I absolutely plan to be asleep at 5:37 a.m. EDT, but will be celebrating the arrival of spring in my dreams.

Once I wake, here are some other ways I’m hoping to mark the weekend:

• Tracking down strawberry plants for my garden and doing another planting of peas
• Reading
• Finishing the stripey pair of socks I had lingering on the needles before Sock Madness began
• Eating cake (I baked a sour cream and blueberry jam cake after Rudi went to bed and then ate two slices!)
• Making some space in the living room (I signed up for a series of pilates videos for the next 30 days and need to shift things around enough to do them)
• Spending time out in the sunshine
• Watching women’s basketball
• Having homemade pizza (unless we decide to metro up to our favorite pizzeria)
• Painting my nails
• Finding photos of our friend Jerry for his Zoom memorial service

How will you be spending the first days of spring?

• Today was not the best day.
• I do not feel like writing paragraphs or stringing thoughts together like Mardi Gras beads, so you’re getting bullets, which, come to think of it, also look like Mardi Gras beads strung together.
• As Rudi was loading the car at 6 a.m. this morning for his winter weekend drive to Pennsylvania for ski coaching he heard a ping. He told me this as he kissed me goodbye “just so you know.” I thought I might not sleep again this morning because now I knew.
• Five minutes later he was back again. One of the tie rods had snapped, which is a far better thing to happen when a car is parked than when you are driving it on the highway at dawn (or any other hour).
• We rented him a car so he could get to his final weekend of coaching for the season.
• When my car broke a couple years back (also on a coaching weekend), it had the decency to still be drivable.
• A baseball games-and-Christmas party friend has cancer. We didn’t find out about it until partway through the pandemic. It was not a good diagnosis. His husband started posting pictures of better days yesterday. This morning he shared that he’s brought our friend home, along with round-the-clock care.
• I spent a lot of today crying.
• It sucks to say goodbye through a comment on a website.
• I also spent a lot of today napping instead of planting peas or sitting out in the sun.
• I watched a Miss Marple episode tonight. Terrible things happen in Agatha Christie novels, but the villain very nearly always gets his or hers in the end.
• I do not know who the villain is in this current story arc of my life — a virus? mutating cells? aging auto parts? — but I hope they get theirs soon.
• My sock-in-progress also sat next to me and watched tv. It didn’t have to put any effort into growing, because I didn’t pick it up.
• I will not advance past this round of Sock Madness and I am okay with that.
• I did start my spring training book, while sitting in the park. The first chapter is about an elderly couple whose home was squatted in while they were away over the winter.
• I bought daffodils at Trader Joe’s earlier. I should probably put them in water. The store doesn’t keep them in water, so I’m not feeling overly urgent about it. But I can’t admire them if they’re sitting in the dish drain, rather than in a vase.
• The drawback of napping all day is that I’m awake. Also, I lost an hour a little while ago, so while the clock currently says 4 a.m., I am taking solace that it would only have been three at this time yesterday.
• The sun will set at 7:14 tonight, which means it won’t really get dark until 8. And that’s a thing to celebrate.

I hope everyone’s weekend plans involve being gentle with themselves as we all mark the anniversary of a life-altering year.

I’m planning to put the peas into the ground in my community garden plot, soaking up some fresh, albeit cooler than the last few days, air. It’s Rudi’s last weekend of coaching for the season, so I have no one to please this weekend but me. I’m also going to go to the farmers market, read and knit, and bake some pie for Pi Day on Sunday. I’ll be springing my clocks forward on Sunday, but I’m taking Monday off to blunt the pain of that.

I saw my first magnolia blooms this evening, so spring is definitely moving our way.

Today (Sunday) would have been Gramma’s 100th birthday. It’s been nearly six years since she’s been gone. I wrote this when she died.

This year, Mum and Dad celebrated with Italian cake and Rudi and I with cannoli. Gramma did love her Italian pastries

I hadn’t expected a wave of tears to smack me upside the head while I was writing this, but it did. Gramma’s death was the first time I learned you could cry in your sleep, but it’s been a long while since she died. And mostly I’m at the point where I think about her fondly or use her still as an impetus to get though a tedious chore.

But this week also marks a one-year anniversary of a different type of loss, and I assume I’ve conflated the two, reimbuing my mourning for my grandmother with the weight of all I and my family have missed since last March.

Be kind to yourselves this week and kind to others. And, for goodness’ sake, have a cookie and a cup of tea. It helps.