I got it! I got it! Run to the hills and shout: I have found my sign!

My thoughts often ramble in this forum, spitting out incomplete stories and references I, or very few, can link together. But a constant you can easily see is my displeasure and the chains I’ve locked around my words.

These April showers bring life to the ground around me and the Sun is prepared to call forth the leaves and the flowers. Mother Nature’s hot, gaseous clock has done the same to me, shredding the sweaters of winter and the coats of duty.

One flower, a daffodil amongst the late roses, comes early in my field of promise.

Years ago I would take my goats for walks outside the fences that kept them from our gardens. Down by the stream linking ponds on either adjacent properties, I would let the goats drink and graze while slipping away to adventures found in books. Four total, including Firecracker, my tall and ornery Nubian, explored the newness of spring while I leapt from each bank, naming rivers a far. The Nile, the Ganges, Euphrates. I saw them all in the pages of National Geographic, rushes of water, bottomless with the unknown.

My day dreaming was interrupted one day. By a sign.

Or should I say, 200 signs. In the form of escaped milk cows, streaming into the field, their hooves stomping towards a nine-year old and his goats. Slapping the goats on the rump, I took off like a deer towards the rock wall (an old way of marking property lines) and vaulted into my back yard. My breath was gone when I reached my parents and gasps about stampeding cows brought laughter and doubt. More made up games and adventures from the little boy.

That lasted about 30 seconds before  cows appeared on the rock wall, mooing and pawing.

I feel that same feeling now, awaken from another dreamy slumber. Living on tales of the past, created by others and proliferated inside my head, I’ve been sitting by the stream again. Awake, I will, for it is not a herd of cattle that has shaken the crumbs from my eyes, but this flower. It rose quickly and shines bright with the coming Sun. The garden revolves around the single yellow center piece, full-throated beauty on its best day and a single pillar of hope on the dark ones.

Tell me no, believe me not. This is the sign, I sought. And let it pass, I shall not.