Sometimes her gaze softens, her arms rise up in front of her, hands drooping, she leans towards me and falls onto me, wrapping her arms around me. "Meggie!" She cries, with sure affection.

The days are longer now. Proper, full days of lightness, no longer the abbreviated days that wrapped you in a long cozy embrace.

But it is still the time for fires in the woodstove, for soup and tea, for a hot water bottle at night, cozy and warm under a fluffy warm duvet.

But the mornings don't greet me with a thick blanket of frost. Snowdrops pop out from the grass, or under the trees on the leafy brown ground.  I saw my first daffodill today, in town.