the Luckiest

Something magic happens, on the first day of Daylight Saving. I forget it every year, thinking it could not possibly be as rose-colored as my memory paints it, but when the day arrives, it blows my delighted memories right out of their frames.

We walked around the snowy fields of the Brooklyn botanic garden, chilly in the afternoon and desperately searching for signs of life, finding little. It was when our legs were finally growing tired, our steps slowing along with our breaths, that we saw the thawing spaces near a sun-drenched wall, the budding flowers bubbling from out of the wet earth. We sat on a park bench and stared into the sun, letting its mild rays warm our skin, as life seeped back into the steeled parts of our beings that had long been neglected in the dark of winter. By the time I returned to the city, the West Village streets bathed in such an overwhelming warm sunlight, even as the evening was growing late, it was not night. People loitered on street corners, didn't seem to have any particular place to be, and I looked them all straight in the eye as I walked down the middle of Bedford Street.

And maybe everything has fallen apart with the incessant cold, maybe the future has been buried under snow and I have slept too many frozen, wretched sleeps, but today none of what has come before could harm me. Today was the very first step of a hundred, thousand, giddy leaps, of bright futures and mad energy coursing through our veins, was the first brick of the life you again set to building for yourself and you know something glorious will come of it.

Today, was something magic.