Struggle

I had another strong dream and woke up early.

It was still dark, but I could hear the songbirds starting, and it felt for the first time like the seasons were changing.

In Santa Fe, winter and spring have been locked in a desperate dance for about the last month — pretty much since I got here. Every few days they take turns on the lead, but then the follower gets jealous and wrestles back control with a hot afternoon or a fierce snow.

It is the kind of struggle where everyone knows who is going to win, but still you can't quite say when it will happen, because it largely depends on how long the loser can last, and it's hard to know how losers are feeling or when they will buckle.

So I got up out of bed and went outside. I walked around the torn up campus in the dark, with the birds and the rabbits moving around. The scars of freezing and thawing were everywhere, casting tire tracks in frozen mud and blocking up windshields and puddles.

In the afternoon I took a nap on the grass, under the sky. It was still cold, but the ground was dry and the sun on my face made it ok. Nearby there were college students sunbathing in bikinis, which was definitely going too far.

But spring can make you overreact, so I think I understood what they were feeling and why they did it.