A full-throated sunny thaw yesterday. With laundry hung on the line, the younger daughter and I dropped off outgrown clothes at the Salvation Army where two volunteers pointed out blackbirds in maple branches spread over the back lot.

Wearing shorts and a white t-shirt, my daughter and I ate lunch outside on a bench, watching folks walk by in everything from summer skirts to zipped-up parkas. It’s that kind of season.

Later, my friend and I walked a dirt road into Hardwick, while the girls clambered over the chicken coop and threw snowballs at each other. The dirt roads ran with trickling channels of melting snow and thawing frost, catching glittering gold coins of sunlight.

There’s that old adage about traveling the world over to discover what you were looking for all those miles was in your own backyard. I’m grit-minded enough to acknowledge that yesterday an antique claw foot bathtub emerged upside down in our yard from melted snow. A ripped pair of outgrown jeans that fell from the clothesline last fall and froze beneath a snowbank bled bluely up through ice. The messiness of compost spreads near my garden. But our treasure is infinite, too.

I’m reading Chronicle of the Narváez Expedition now, a fascinating tale written by a Spanish conquistador. Again, the same story of desire and seeking, of gold and suffering. I can speculate how this short narrative will end…..

Gold is a treasure, and he who possesses it does all he wishes to in this world, and succeeds in helping souls into paradise.

– Christopher Columbus