The air is cool and clean, playfully batting my cheek and filling my lungs. The wet porch beneath me is cold but comfortable. An enormous green bush hides me from passers by, but I can peer through the branches to the road beyond. Watching without being watched. Seeing without being seen. I’m pretty used to the view.
The evening sky is a cotton candy blue, and the bare trees reach up into it like skeleton arms. Birds chirp and children scream in the distance. A car door opens and shuts. I hear muffled voices from inside my house.
Another car creeps around the corner and I return to my book. The breeze nips at my bare legs and I like the feeling of wearing shorts outside for the first time since October.
More car doors. More birds. I look up at the light sky and see a bug zoom by, then a bird. The crisp air around me smells like rain and earth.
I could get used to this. I could get used to spring in February.
I return to my book once more, my back starting to ache. Then, when the pale reading light from the sky above is all but gone, I stand, open the front door, and return to the stale air of my front hall.