peeking out the window...

All I can say is, it isn't pretty anymore.  All that white stuff floating down from the sky, drifting like fine lace across the tree branches can go away.  Preferably now.  I promised you a week by week look at how spring is approaching, but it seems spring is playing coy this year...it's one baby step forward and three giant steps back. Someone at work changed the sign that read "15 days til spring" to "spring has been cancelled."  We all dispiritedly agreed that might be true.  No one has the oomph to play Pollyanna when it comes to the weather anymore.

I happened to catch the movie with Hayley Mills as Pollyanna on television last week, but I simply don't think playing her "Glad Game" will help with our foul weather moods right now.  And that's a double foul--foul weather outside as well as foul moods indoors!

I can't quite figure out how to be glad at what I saw yesterday in my backyard--five more inches of snow!

Last week

Yesterday...this is not progress!

Last week

Yesterday

But even though winter's dregs are weighing us down and every spirit on the earth seems as fervourless as I, writer Thomas Hardy must have been playing the Glad Game when he wrote this lovely poem---I am sure Pollyanna would appreciate how the thrush chooses to fling his soul upon the growing gloom.  Maybe it's time we join in the game...what have we got to lose at this point?  

The Darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate

      When Frost was spectre-grey,

And Winter's dregs made desolate

      The weakening eye of day.

The tangled bine-stems scored the sky

      Like strings of broken lyres,

And all mankind that haunted nigh

      Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be

      The Century's corpse outleant,

His crypt the cloudy canopy,

      The wind his death-lament.

The ancient pulse of germ and birth

      Was shrunken hard and dry,

And every spirit upon earth

      Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among

      The bleak twigs overhead

In a full-hearted evensong

      Of joy illimited;

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,

      In blast-beruffled plume,

Had chosen thus to fling his soul

      Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings

      Of such ecstatic sound

Was written on terrestrial things

      Afar or nigh around,

That I could think there trembled through

      His happy good-night air

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew

      And I was unaware.