(photo by m.a.h. hinton)
The unseasonably warm winter continues here in the North Country. Each day the sun climbs just a bit higher and burns just a bit brighter and longer. The longer light lightens the load, quickens our step.
In Florida and Arizona spring training is beginning, another sign of spring. The local 9 coming off an historically bad year look pretty much the same. An addition here or there. It does not engender great confidence. But if Morneau’s issues are finally behind him and if Mauer… if Mauer could become another player than he is….
I wrote last spring here about the Twins 200-million-dollar man (Puckett vs. Mauer). After last year’s debacle, I feel even less confident of the Twins’ future. But since it is spring and the season of hope, I hope to be proved wrong.
Pre-season time is like springtime for a sports fan. So is having a team that is doing well. It puts a little extra bounce in your step, makes it much easier to enjoy the littlest things of life.
Non-sports fans seem always bewildered by this. Sometimes arrogantly so. I never leave a conversation though with someone who says they do not watch sports without shaking my head and thinking, “poor, dumb bastard.”
Life without sports and the arts is an empty thing. Life with just one or the other is a life just half lived.
MontanaWriter as a blog is, as emailers sometimes remind me, unfocused… one day a poetry review, the next a western, the next something about sports or theology. To grow a blog, they say, you need to have one central theme and post everyday. I know the latter is true and something I want to move toward. But the former….
Life is too full of too many fascinating things. There are too many books to be read. Too many poems to be read aloud. There are too many games to watch. And the sky is too big to settle on just one thing under it.
MontanaWriter reaches its two-year anniversary next month. It is still still evolving and settling in… just as its creator is still evolving and settling in.
Pitchers and catchers have reported. Spring is just around the corner. Hope in the air.