I want spring

I really want spring to arrive. This year more than ever. The arctic tundra in my backyard is depressing me. I feel like I am living on a glacier that will never melt. The bad part is that when it actually gets warm enough to melt, then it just turns into a mud-snow mix which cakes onto shoes and dog feet (all twelve of the feet), and is tracked into the house one piece of mud at a time. Then it freezes again as soon as the sun goes down, and it repeats the pattern each day. Living in Colorado, I should be accustomed to the winter, but this winter seems longer than all the rest, or else I have just grown weary of it this year.

I want to wake up one morning and be able to walk outside into the warm sunshine without bundling up into sweats and shoes just to retrieve the morning newspaper. I want to feel sweat dripping down my back again as I weed my garden. I want to feel like drinking a cold beer because they taste so great on a hot summer day. I want to grill outside and actually be able to sit on the patio while the food cooks, rather than run from inside the house to the grill every few moments, checking on the food, only to return to the heated house for some comfort before venturing out again. I want baseball season to start and I want to eat hot dogs at the ballpark and I want to sing "take me out to the ballgame" at the top of my lungs during the seventh inning stretch. I want to go fishing and sit in my lawn chair and look at the trees and the birds and the sky with nothing more than shorts and a T-shirt on.

I think Puxatawney Phil should be replaced. I really hate his prediction each year because he never makes it happen for us.

Please, spring, make your presence known soon. Just pop one little tulip or daffodil through the surface of the frozen muck. I need you.