Poem for Thursday and Bellevue Flowers

Today 

By Billy Collins 

If ever there were a spring day so perfect,

so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze

that it made you want to throw

open all the windows in the house

and unlatch the door to the canary's cage,

indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,

a day when the cool brick paths

and the garden bursting with peonies

seemed so etched in sunlight

that you felt like taking

a hammer to the glass paperweight

on the living room end table,

releasing the inhabitants

from their snow-covered cottage

so they could walk out,

holding hands and squinting

into this larger dome of blue and white,

well, today is just that kind of day.

-------- 

My Thursday was pretty quiet. Katniss seems better -- she's eating, she's not throwing up, and her energy levels seem okay, though she's not stuffing her face as fast as usual, and Effie, who is usually the bullied when it comes to food, is hissing at her to try to steal bites. I did a bunch of closet organizing -- now that we've been here nearly a year, I have a much better sense of which layers get worn a lot and which are pretty useless. 

The weather was gorgeous, nearly 60 degrees and sunny, and the eagles were both out when we walked to the park. Sadly, the Terps lost to Wisconsin and are out of the Big 10 tournament, but happily, made both shepherd's pie and tollhouse pie while I was on my Thursday night chat, so we had awesome dinner afterward. Now we're watching more Resident Alien. Here are flowers growing at Bellevue Botanical Garden last week: