I lack the words to describe how nice it was that the weather had been in the 60s, that there’d been a decent amount of sunlight, and that I’d been able to comfortably wear shorts. Nevertheless, that’s what the rest of this blog post will be about. It just felt so nice, you know? I wanted to exult in it for a while, enjoy the end of my seasonal depression and bask in the gloriously chilly but still comfy weather we had for the few days it was here.

To be completely honest, not much changed. The warmer weather and the bit of sunlight we had didn’t really do much for me. However, they were probably the most uncomplicated, simply nice things that had come into my life in a while so I’m trying to appreciate them. After all, my apartment is easy to cool, I don’t live in a danger zone for forest fires, and there currently isn’t THAT MUCH of a drought in my area. I can just enjoy the sun, warm wind, and clear skies without having to avoid thoughts of climate change, high electricity bills, or how much the world feels like it is going to hell from one day to the next. Which is a tall order, give everything that happened last week when I initially wrote this… It was the sanity-saving simple joy I needed to get through the week.

After such a long winter, that started super early and lasted through at least half of spring, it feels so nice to go for my daily walk without a sweatshirt or coat. To take a deep breath of warm air that doesn’t freeze my nose or fill me with apprehension that another chill is coming. In a few weeks (maybe longer, given how trees are only just beginning to grow leaves) I will be so stuffed up that I’ll be living in pure misery aside from the brief hours at the peak of my allergy medicine’s effectiveness. Tree pollen allergies make late spring days very hit or miss, but it’s a swing I’m willing to take this year in exchange for sunshine and some actual warmth.

I wish we’d have more of these kind of days before the late-spring pollen season arrives so I can actually enjoy some spring hiking and naps beneath trees as a cool breeze wicks the hiking sweat from my shirt. There is little I enjoy more than hiding my face from the sun by cleverly propping my hat up on the pillow I’ve made out of my backpack so I can get an hour’s rest before the sun hits my face again, confident in my knowledge that the earliness of the season and lateness of the day mean that I won’t have to worry about too many bugs and sunburn, respectively. There really isn’t much like the smell of sweat, spring, and cool lake water to lull me into a comfortable doze.

It is very difficult to not branch this post into something lamenting the loss of simpler times or times when I felt more emotionally stable or when my life seemed less difficult to me. A little taste of something good, when it finally goes away as all things do, can make me feel incredibly wistful and nostalgic as I think about what I just had and when I last had it before that. It can be easy to get sucked into thinking about all the good times that have passed and dwelling on how long it has been since they last came around. Instead of doing that, though, I decided to go curl up under a blanket on my couch, enjoy the crisp night air flowing through my apartment, and do my best to enjoy what I had the day I wrote this instead of thinking about how long it might be before another day like that comes around.