Are these popping up around you, too? I guess that it’s February showers that bring March flowers (at least now). It’s such a psychological boost to see the austere winter landscape coming to life once again and the earliest happy faces, the daffodils, smiling serenely…as they always do. Don’t forget to stop and smell those flowers.

For the fellow word nerds out there: what’s more satisfying when composing haiku than a single word that both fits the bill and has five syllables (swoon)? It’s like playing Scrabble and using every tile…and that’s how I prefer to play it, making as many (arguably esoteric) polysyllabic words as possible and trying to use all of my tiles. It may not rack up as many points, but it’s so much fun!