The last few weekends have been filled with outdoor adventures of every sort.  Between events and obligations we have found every little crack of time and filled them with fresh air. (I’m not even owning up to how much laundry is waiting to be done!)  Before Easter there was hiking and pussywillow hunting, the week before that was maple syrup tapping, this weekend was biking and fishing.  And you can bet that every unmentioned minute revolved around dog park walks with Pieper and downtown wandering with cameras.  I’m starting to wonder if the theme for April is “how many places can I appropriately wear my Hunter galoshes?”
I think this “spring buzz” is an exclusively midwestern thing.  If you glance through my photos, you can see that it is still cold enough to require hats and coats.  There is ice floating at the edges of the river, and other tokens to remind you that though the sun is shining and the birds are chirping, the thermometer only reads around 45.  This week is of course the exception, and after a long winter involving layer-upon-layer of clothing and stomping our feet while pumping gas (to make sure we don’t lose blood flow), the spring buzz has hit us, and we are out the door nearly forgetting our keys and shoes in the process.  We are raking our yards, trimming our trees, mulching our gardens, tuning our bikes, stringing our fishing rods, and vowing never to wear socks again.
It’s funny how we can be trapped in our homes by the negative 30 degree windchill in the dead of winter, swearing to ourselves that we will not stay in Wisconsin another year, and then that feeling can be completely erased by these first warm days of spring.  Somehow it is replaced by daydreams of campfires, parades, and summer. And that is the beauty of the midwest: there is something so much sweeter about having earned it all, (paying for it with windburned faces and icy car windows).
Happy spring, midwesterners! Time to walk my dog.
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