It’s the middle of March, and the past couple of days here in the Seattle area have been mild and sunlit with clear skies. This is when those of us who live here know spring is on the way. It’s not that this weather will endure; we will have many more days of gray skies and drizzle before spring fully takes hold, and those days may spill well into summer. But days like this tell us that spring is coming, that the trees and flowers are budding, that the darkness of winter is on the way out.

When days like this happen, my spouse and I like to do what we call Balcony Afternoons. We have a balcony directly off our bedroom, large enough to accommodate us and some lounge chairs and a small table and our pets (as well as a feeder for the hummingbirds). Our house is at the south end of a lake, and while our neighborhood is decidedly humanized and suburban, we can see the lake and the hills that ring it and the birds that float and feed on it and old growth trees that haven’t been torn out to make space for the humans, as well as the soaring sky. These days are brilliant and precious, and we want to experience them and cherish them. We go outside for a couple of hours with a bottle of wine and some snacks, and just enjoy the time outside.

We’ve lived in this house for seven years (as of the end of this month). It was always intended as not just a home but a refuge, and for more than half the time we’ve lived here it’s been a near-constant sanctuary from the pandemic as well as our home. We chose this house because of the lake and trees and birds and balcony, among many other reasons, and we cherish those things each day but especially on days like this.

The past several months have been…a lot. We’ve had individual and family struggles, including death and injury and illness and turmoil. Six months ago, I quit a job I’d held for nearly a decade, after years of overwork and burnout and unmanageable expectations, and it was less to go to something new than it was to simply end the ongoing damage. I’m still not recovered from that and I don’t know when I will be. I’m still figuring out who I am outside of that job and that workplace and whether I’ll ever return to a lot of things I love to do (which, not gonna lie, included things I did in that job). But on this edge of spring day, I can feel both respite and hope as I sink into the view and the warmth and all the signs of the world cycling back to spring for this year.

I’m a native of the Pacific NW, and I’ve lived here the majority of my life. I know the rhythm of the seasons here and I expect the darkness and damp of autumn and winter. To be honest, I cherish autumn here; the first part of it remains lovely and dry more often than not, with pleasantly crisp days and autumn colors and the pleasures of coziness, and then comes Spooky Season, which I especially appreciate as an avowed goth. I love autumn twilight and bare branches and mist and the need for extra light, as we move towards the prime gothy holiday; and even after All Hallow’s Eve, we move into the defiant sparkle and hearty pleasures of the end of year holidays, which help stave off the worst of the dark and damp as we approach the winter solstice. But I won’t lie: the time after those end of year holidays and through January is rough, and eventually even I have had enough of the dark and damp.

That’s why these days on the edge of spring are so precious: they are the end of the rough dark times and a sign that brighter times are ahead. I will luxuriate in the brighter, warmer days of spring, in the return of spring/summer migrants and the blooming flowers and the phenomenal greens that we have in summer to complement the evergreens we’re fortunate to have year-round and the opportunity to sit on my balcony and revel in the lake and sky and trees. Eventually it will get hot (which didn’t used to happen, but our climate is broken so it’s always hot in summer now), and things will get dry and brown, and we’ll probably have fires and smoke that make summer difficult to fully savor. When autumn comes around again, I’ll be more than ready for it. But right now, we are in the part of the cycle where the dark and cold starts to retreat and the brightness returns, and right now I need that.

Today we had a rosé from a favorite winery in the central part of the state and some delightful cheeses and a luscious onion jam (and charcuterie for my spouse). One of our neighbors ran his power washer for a couple of hours; when he finally shut it off, the absence of its noise highlighted the pleasant background noise of our neighborhood. A Bewick’s wren sang his burbling running-brook song, because it’s that season, and the chickadees and Steller’s jays called at each other. A pair of adult crows billed and groomed atop a tree down the street, while the adolescent crows fluttered around the neighborhood in a gang, yelling and playing. Nothing unusual for this time of year…but special and beautiful all the same, every time. And I’m grateful we have more of this to come as spring fully expands.