Spring?

There is something that has always fascinated me about the arrival spring. The idea that one day it can be cold and gray while the next can be warm and sunny. That nearly from one day to the next the trees are budding and the flowers are blooming. It is a season of many “news”; new life, new hope, new new. In the US like in Kenya it is a season to have new hope in the possibility of a new government. Last week, the opposition party in Kenya signed a peace deal that will hopefully bring lasting peace and new government to the country. There was even new hope for me in my thesis this week, which is good news as I am hoping that this spring will bring my graduation and a new job too.

Though official spring doesn’t start until March 21 this week, living in the South brings spring earlier than in the Northern parts. I don’t remember spring like this when I lived in Minnesota, spring was the first two weeks of May at best. Here spring started in the middle of February the daffodils and apple trees started to bloom. That isn’t to say that it has been warm this whole time, there were even snow flurries in the air this morning! Yesterday, I went for a run in shorts and a t-shirt so I am hoping that nice weather will be back soon. Last year at this time I was waiting for the arrival of my family for their first visit to the South of the US. We spent a great week together exploring some of the history of this region as well as enjoying the beautiful weather. I will not be having their visit this year; instead I am spending the next week working intently on my thesis. In the last month, since my last entry, my thesis has finally taken shape and I should have a complete draft done soon.

The other new that spring has brought me, is a new backpack. It was sad to “retire” my old yellow backpack, after having traveled with it across all my adventures in the world in the past 9 years. It has been shoved under airplane, train, and bus seats, it has been tied to the roof of taxi-brousse in Madagascar, and been made very dusty in the back of a truck in Bolivia. It has carried my class books through my undergraduate and much of my graduate education. In a sense that bag has been one constant in my life as I have explored the world, I knew where everything went in that one and how to find it with my eyes closed or in the pitch black. Even people who know me might need to get use to recognizing me with a new backpack since the other one was such a fixture in my life. I am still getting use to my new one, the pockets are different, the straps are different, and it is a dark shade of blue. I still have the yellow one and it might still make appearance on hikes on sunny days or even for short trips. Below is one of my favorite pictures of my backpack and I, it was taken this past summer in Kenya. I am riding on the back of a "boda-boda" and my friend Marc took this picture from his seat on the back of another "boda-boda."