April 1st

I want this month to begin the way all good things do: slowly, without announcement. Bare feet finding the cool of new wooden floors in the early morning, before the day has remembered itself. The particular silence of a new house that is becoming a home, where every creak and settle is a small negotiation, a promise.

I want April to smell like lily of the valley and lilac carried through an open window on a wind that doesn’t yet know it’s spring but is trying… God, it is trying!!!! That first gust that lifts the hair from your neck and makes you close your eyes without deciding to.

I want it to taste like black coffee, drunk standing at the kitchen counter, watching the cherry blossom do its brief, indifferent thing outside. How it blooms without caring whether anyone is watching. How I am watching anyway.

I want to sleep in linen sheets that hold the warmth of morning in their wrinkles. To wake unhurried. To let the light be slow.

I want warm spring rain on a Sunday, the kind that makes staying in feel like a choice rather than a retreat. The kind that blurs the window glass into something impressionistic and soft, and makes the whole world look the way it does in memory.

And underneath all of it, quieter than the rest, harder to name, I want the feeling I keep catching at the edges of ordinary moments: the quiet pride of a life being built. Not finished. Not yet. But building. The satisfaction of a shelf put up crooked and fixed. Of knowing which floorboard sings.

April, I am asking you for tenderness. For the particular grace of beginning again inside a life that is already, somehow, mine.