Finally!

It's spring! yes yes yes! The trees are blooming, the first flowers are showing their colors, the birds are chirping. Even the dogs look happy while peeing on the sidewalks and no longer have that "hurry hurry before my paws freeze and I get stuck here!" kind of expression. Misery is no more, happiness is in the air. Pants are being tossed in the back of the closet and skirts get shorter as temperatures rise (not me mind you); flip-flops do their flippy-flapping in a wishful way although it's still a bit nippy out there. The moment it gets above 50F (10C for you mathematically challenged) New Yorkers don their summer attires so as to dare Old Man Winter to show his face again. I often see them shivering stubbornly in the evening, with a sweater around their waist and refusing to admit that they might be very close to hypothermia. I sometimes feel like reminding some of those dare devils that we have had snowstorms in April, but hey, to each it's own.
I, very wisely, have learned the lesson and carry my faithful pashmina around. Don't want to look like an old lady wearing the "just in case it gets cold" buttoned up sweater, discreetly admitting that they have the right idea about the "evening chill". And so during these spring evenings generation gaps become painfully obvious...
Anyway, spring is here and so I open the windows, start considering the million variations of salads I will be making, buy flowers that never fully satisfy me and patiently contemplate the soon-to-be-here dips in the pool.
Somehow it's harder going to work during springtime than during summer. I guess that since spring is the first hint we get of any outside activity where layering is not involved we feel like being outside all the time. By summer we get used to it and even look forward to air conditioning... right now the simple thought of AC makes us roll our eyes and say "pleeeease". Any second we are out there we inhale as if to take it all in, sort of like letting our lungs fill in with the new and get rid of the stale air winter has.
And so spring is here. I am going to playfully skip on to the kitchen and make a wonderful herb and mushrooms omelet accompanied by, what else? a nice mesclun salad, the whole finished by a nice lemon sorbet, my pashmina nearby just in case I get a bit of a chill...