Lethargos. Lethargamanos!

Five days ago, snow and icicles:



Yesterday, this:


The apricot tree is in bloom! Can you believe it? We'll get another snow storm at the end of this month or the beginning of the next and it will all freeze, but for right now, the bees and I are content to pretend that the warm afternoons and flowering things mean that it's spring.

I stood right up next to the tree while I took those pictures with my cell phone and now I regret it, as every single pollen grain that those flowers are putting out went straight up into my sinuses and are now making me miserable. I didn't sneeze or tear up or get itchy (I mean, I do those things too, though not in response to this particular allergen) but I suddenly felt as though someone had laid a heavily batted quilt over my brain.

When I was younger, I never had allergies, but about ten years ago: Surprise! The most unexpected allergy symptoms have been the fog that rolls over The Brain and the deep, almost somnambulistic lethargy that envelops me each spring. It lasts for months and it wasn't until last year that I thought: Oh! This is because of allergies. Before I realized that, I always just assumed that spring meant that I was starting that inevitable slow descent into depression, something that is characterized by that same loss of energy and a lack of enthusiasm for anything but the familiar nest of my bed. Or maybe it's a combination of the two. That seems like it would be fun, doesn't it?

Gray Kitty ran outside this afternoon and when he came back in he rubbed against my leg for some pets. When I looked down, I could see that he was covered in dried, fallen elm flowers from having rolled around in the dirt outside. He was so proud of himself that I hardly had the heart to brush out his coat and sweep the mess out the door. Damn cat.


The whole sky looked like that yesterday afternoon.

The day was so warm and sunny that I joined the cats outside for a bit, sitting on the patio in the sun for about ten minutes. (A little sun goes a long way here in the desert.) I flipped through this week's issue of The New Yorker, which had just arrived in the mail. I usually flip through it right away to look at all the cartoons, then I put it in the basket of reading material next to the toilet, where it sometimes gets read, sometimes not, over the next week.  This weeks looks like not. But we'll see.

It's time to start thinking about the garden anyway.