pre-spring free verse-y blog post

Wake up to a quiet house, temporarily kidless, and itching to clean and organize - not unlike pregnancy nesting, but a spring thing this time. Start in the kitchen, then add other rooms until there's a harmony and a rhythm working. But what am I doing, I think. It's gorgeous outside! And so Lizzie the Cowdog and I take the show out there where the horses watch, needing their own spring cleaning (shelter mucked, winter coats stripped, water tank scoured, and on and on). The Pink Trailer calls, and so I answer. Throw open the door and behold an eternity's worth of stuff needing to be dealt with, some of it hard - the rocking pony from daughter's toddler years, boxes of old divorce documents and lots of stuff probably best Goodwilled, but I have a hard time letting go sometimes. (The rocking horse stays. Period.) Hours pass, and they looked like this: me hauling the Rubbermaided (Rubbermaidened?) evidence of years already lived from the trailer to the woodshed; me going through the drawers and cupboards and closet of the trailer, seeing what's there (old coffee perkpot, old laundry clips, old flatware, all of it charming) and dreaming of camping trips at nearby lakes this summer, checking out the tires, eyeballing the ancient suspension, more formless pondering. Scrub the trailer's innards then stand back, pleased. Trees need attention next (from whence this energy?) - the liquidambar and the quaking aspen planted last fall, plus the live spruce from Christmas, still babies all. Settle the spruce into its new hole (chicken wire-lined against our looky-loo prairie dog neighbors). The hose is dragged out next so all can get a deep, late-winter watering, even though it doesn't feel like winter anymore the way I'm sweating. Aiming the hose at new roots I look up startled by sound of an eagle's cry overhead. Turns out there are two of them - adult bald eagles - swooping and swirling in the sky above my house, either courting or battling in a falling spiral, but whatever it is it's extraordinary, an extraordinary gift. Even Lizzie the Cowdog stares up at them, head cocked, ears up. We're frozen at the sight, and as I stand there with sweat on my back and my hands covered in water and dirt I realize that a) we're done for the day, and b) we're just getting started.Follow @nicole_mcinnes