It’s nearly 7pm on a Thursday in April, and I’m standing in my yard.  My mind is abuzz with the day’s work, tomorrow’s work, reliving and overthinking a conversation from earlier in the day, and churning over so many other things….. I’m so stuck in my head that it takes me several minutes to feel the gentle tug at my sleeve of what all of my senses are communicating to me.

I close my eyes and it all comes flooding in…

The heavy smell of golden daffodils, living lavender in the blooms on the lily magnolia tree, the freshly cut grass beneath my feet…

The songs of at least 4 different birds fill my ears, underscored by the drone of crickets…. A lawnmower in the neighbor’s yard, the sound of my own breath moving through my nostrils….

It’s a soft, 70-something degree evening with just the slightest breeze, and I feel wrapped up and held in the softest embrace of air….

I keep my eyes closed for a few seconds more, willing myself to stop thinking and just absorb all this loveliness….

As my breathing slows, and I feel some of the tension in my gut start to relax, I slowly open my eyes, wanting to see all this again as if for the first time. It’s the golden hour now, and everything around me is intensely green, bathed in amber light. This is a world verdant, rich, and so fully alive that I feel like a tea leaf slowly unfurling in the perfect cup of water.  Trees are putting forth new leaves, dogwoods are flowering white and pink, there are lamb’s ears, wild onion grass, an earth carpeted in violets, apple blossoms shading the grave of a beloved cat who left us four months ago. The tulips I planted last Fall have already bloomed and are fading now, soon to be replaced by bearded iris’ and columbines.

In this light all my thirsts are quenched, and all my dreams seem like they could become real. How can I not smile into the sunset?  How can I not feel only and utterly hopeful in this moment?  Time slows down here, as it does in all perfect places. And I am thankful.

This is my second Spring in Kentucky, my adopted (and hopefully forever) home.  Every landscape has its own magic, but April in Kentucky is not to be dismissed.  To stand in an evening like this is to actually absorb sunshine to make my own chlorophyl (thank you for that lovely image Robin Wall Kimmerer)- it is to become a new, green thing- as alive an anything can ever be.

It was a hard winter for me, both physically and spiritually (although I LOVE winter weather!), and as the earth has turned back toward the sun once again, all my hope is growing back, just like all the sweet, green things around me.   The fireflies will be coming out in the next month (along with the mosquitos, lol), and the magic will continue all summer.