I've been locking myself up in my house

Bud

Maybe there is life out there, the force that through the green fuse drives the flower, waking up again. Yesterday broke records, at sixty degrees, the temperatures normally reserved for May. There's carbon in our atmosphere for you. I'm thinking about taking up bicycling again. Maybe I could bike to the grocery store fifteen miles away on dirt roads and come back, at least in the summer.

Today I caught the tail end of a documentary about the dolphins being killed by tuna fishermen, and then I had tuna for dinner. It wasn't intentional--the tuna was leftover--I've been resolving not to buy it anymore--but still, the fact remains. The thing I want to do I do not do. Who shall rescue me from this body of death?

And maybe that's what winter is for. Reminding us that, like the dying god, we too will die. Die and be reborn.

I'm sick of writing about winter. I'm sick of thinking about winter. I'm sick of taking photographs of winter. But still, winter persists. I understand, now, the linguistic urban legend about Eskimos and their 385 words for snow. I could come up with a dozen off the top of my head, most of them involving incarnations of profanity.

But yesterday, I paused on my bridge of ice. I stopped, and I took one picture, of one bud. There it is. The green fuse is driving that force. The dolphins swim through the sea, and maybe they'll figure out what we've been doing to them all of these years and come after us. As everyone knows, Douglas Adams not least among them, they're smarter than us and they've been that way for a long time.