The caged animal feeling left the building yesterday, when the temperature rose to 45 degrees, and I walked around Jamaica Pond (ok, there were multiple lake areas, deep enough to drown in, but I’ll take it). What with daylight savings time kicking in, and the sun shining it’s happy face up there in the sky, normally so stifled by snowflakes, yesterday was the sort of day I wanted to throw a parade down Newbury Street, I felt so freaking happy.

But my gratitude doesn’t go to yesterday, and it’s temperate weather, it goes to the winter of 2015, for starving me of outdoor time, hammering away at my optimism like one of Santa’s elves, almost forcing me to break up with this part of the country. Because without this atrocious, miserable, snowmageddon of a season, I would not be walking on sunshine now that the frigid temps and blizzard-every-sunday seem to be history.

This is the money shot, this is the bag of gold, to be so hungry, that a meal makes you feel like a shiny new penny. This is the opposite of awful, the part where things shift, and the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t a plow, but the sun. This is what makes us happy: to have been sad. This is the part that makes us understand why suffering of any kind isn’t so bad, because it helps us to balance all that is good, and feel it in a way that having dessert eight times a day wouldn’t allow us to feel it. That sun was so good yesterday, I tell you. It was everything. And it was because this winter, this historical, almost record-breaking winter, almost broke us, that yesterday felt like all your best days rolled into one. Throw me the sunscreen, we’re back in business.