Three beautiful things from the past week:

1. Thursday, we got an early jump on our departure for Connecticut. It was lovely to walk into my parents’ house before midnight. An early bedtime meant that I had plenty of time on Friday morning to spend with Gramma and Mum and Dad before the day got too busy.

2. Last weekend was a chance to reconnect with many of our friends from the Northeast. I chatted with BW on the drive north. The next evening, John (and his wife Kim), Di, and Shelley and Mike joined us for our annual Good Friday pizza dinner at Modern. Then we caught up with ECN, who was feeling too under-the-weather to join us for dinner but who graciously allowed us to stop by afterwards. And on Saturday, Karen and I got to spend the afternoon together eating Vietnamese food, drinking scary bubble tea, and talking for hours. I love how flexible friendship is — that it can stretch through time and space and still resume its comfortable and reassuring shape.

3. Usually my headphones go on pretty early in my commute to work. I find listening to music or a podcast lessens how jarring the transition from home life to work life is to this night owl. But this morning, I was a bit slow with the ear buds and instead got to hear an avian symphony of calls and songs as the neighborhood birds reminded me that, despite the cold, they knew it to be spring.