I left my house today to find all things about me were wet.
Not from melted snow, but from legitimate, god-given rain.
I could smell the downpour in everything, all things ecstatic that they had survived so far.
And this is when I decided that winter had ended.
That's right, people, it's over. We can all go home.
Winter may pretend to linger, and it will probably snow again.
But I can feel it in my bones, the seasons have changed.
The trees cry out that they still live. The soil itself is stretching and yawning.
It seems this always happens when the seasons change.
Summer ends, and there is a change in the wind.
Before the leaves even begin to fall, autumn is present. An elephant in the proverbial room.
In late October (in salt lake at least), the earth enters the big sleep and snow begins to fall.

It seemed strange that I could feel this so distinctly.
But it's entirely natural, from a step back. Birds fly south, salmon migrate.
Perhaps, in fact, it's stranger that I would consider it strange.
The seasons are more natural than anything else we know. The cycles of the earth are at the core of our experience in terms of being alive on this planet.

Maybe we should begin to worry when we can only tell the seasons by the calendar.
Or maybe it would be worse if all that the seasons changing meant was a change in wardrobe.

Our ancestors used to rely on these sensory gut feelings to properly harvest their crops.
Frankly, I'm embarrassed that the term "sweater weather" exists.

I take pride in the fact that I participated in the plants stretching today.
We yawned and raised our faces to the rain and rejoiced as one.
It reminded me that the cycle goes on, and nothing really ends and yet everything ends but nothing really really ends.
It's just a little rain, after all.