Just About Day

Today was Easter Sunday, a just about day, a just about spring day. An almost spring day. I took the walking stick for a walk not far, not far at all, just down the lane to the end of the road and a small loop around. But during this time, about six, it was just about evening but not yet quite and just about spring but not just yet. It was all about to maybe be tomorrow. It was what they call the quickening, a precise little word seldom used anymore.

 Everything is still pretty stingy bare, branches and sod, but beginning its bulging budtobe by bud and the tips of branches are capped with the possibility of leaves. Spring is almost but not quite settled into her workspace, so people are as sparse as those leaves, Easter Sunday, so they were indulging elsewhere, more indoors with families, waiting for the sun to shove them out for good. 

It was so but it gave the street that holiday-vacated look of a cat-nap. Some people had come out, as if to stretch and take stock before the coming Monday, bank holiday but work-day for others. A couple walking...a man emerging, head-first, out of his car into the house on the sidestreet...a three year old in a tee reaching out cautiously to hold "a worm!" from her dad on one knee before the earth he was stirring up...and I did a doubletake at the woman in her forties, simply asit on her tiny porch in a liquid blue knit V neck just as I noted the magnolia blooms beginning to muster on a bush across the road from her. 

I forgot about the magnolia and backtracked to look at her, still hands in her lap, plainly just in a chair on the porch, doing little else but maybe watching me drag a stick down the street. Or wait for spring to check in. I love the blue of your top, I called out. Its like Easter egg blue. She laughed. It was true. But nothing really was going on, but rather readying to be more going on rather soon. 

At another corner, a mexican man was clearing last year's leaves into a paper bag. Kids about to be teenagers were kicking about a ball on the school soccer and Canadian geese field. It was not yet spring but it could be soon, any moment. It was spring caught yawning, just about ready to step into the shower.