It doesn't feel like March.

70 to 80 degree weather, warm nights, and our world is gaudy with color--crabapples the color of pink lemonade, Bradford pears in lacy pompoms, magnolias opening their saucer blooms to a robin's egg sky, bedecked daffodils (Happy late Daffodil Day, by the way), and the forsythia going absolutely lemon-wild. Some of you will remember that I thought "Forsythia" would be a gorgeous middle name for Bea, who was born almost at this time four years ago, but she took "Fern" instead, much more sensible but not as fraptious.

I do love forsythia, even though they are only truly glorious for a week. I don't understand why people dismiss something because its beauty is short-lived; you'd have to pooh-pooh the butterfly, and that's just the beginning.

I can only think that we as middle-class consumers look for the most enduring bang for our buck, so to plant a row of forsythia, which can grow quite gangly and only blooms yellow for about 1/52.18 of the year, seems like a meaningless extravagance.

And I suppose too, that in the same attitude of economy, you could dismiss a whole cornucopia of magnificence, but as Babette's Feast or simply being in love teaches us, we often find grace only when we allow ourselves to embrace extravagance.

I remember someone telling me once that they found themselves holding back active friendship from a dying person, because of the energy expenditure and the output of love that would only end in loss. It's a cliche--"'tis better to have loved. . ." but it's true that it's always better to exhaust myself loving well, though it opens me to pain.

It would be easy to take what has happened to us in the past three weeks--a horrible, dark thing of injustice--and throw it over our last seven years here. But that would be like throwing a cloak over our garden, snuffing out every lovely flower blossom, sorrowing over the whole thing because the end was disappointing. I refuse to do it. As I told an about-to-graduate student the other day, we won't let this ruin things for us; we'll celebrate every good thing that has happened and leave knowing that this was, indeed, a good place, where we came to love better and where we were loved well.

At the grocery store today, waiting at the deli, I chatted with a woman who, like many people I've talked with lately, shook her head warily over the amazing days we've been having, warning that it will only end badly with a freak snow storm or a summer of swarmy mosquitoes. It's beautiful now, sure, but in a couple months? Pestilence!

Meanwhile? Meanwhile, I'm enjoying every minute, gobbling this feast of beauty while it lasts, and I won't stop until I have to.