What a difference a week can make, right? Last weekend: snowed in. This weekend: signs of spring are everywhere.

Signs of early spring I noticed yesterday:

• The trailer was warm enough to open the windows.
• The hundreds of gallons of water in the form of ice crystals covering the landscape was transforming back into its liquified form. In town, this meant there were several teams of town employees pumping out ditches in danger of flooding the road--or the trailer park. Oops! Too late for the trailer park! It was a lake!
• No coats, no winter boots, bare arms.
• Lineups at the car washes in town around the block. (I decided to wash my van another time.)
• The snow in my yard was soft enough that a half-hour or so of shovelling revealed the walkway that disappeared about three weeks ago in winter's final death throes.
• The sudden urge I felt to buy a place setting for ten of polka-dotted melamine dishes, a matching pitcher, and a salad spinner, with the intent of making our summer entertaining much more comfortable this year.
• The also-sudden urge to go find picnic table plans, with the same intent as the last point.

Unfortunately, the only one in my family who has not been ill this week is me! (Well, I feel fortunate, but not so much the rest of the family.) Jabin and Jason have been sick since the beginning of the week, with Jason taking three days off of work. By Thursday, the other two boys had succumbed, so we declared "no-school days" for Thursday and Friday. However, since we have just started our unit on the Ocean, the days were not completely uneducational--they watched two hours of BBC's "The Blue Planet: Seas of Life" each of those days. Fabulously-done movies.

Not teaching all day meant that I got to take a walk in the sunshine, and also succumb to another Sudden Urge--spring cleaning!