In eight minutes and twenty seconds you will receive a gift

To accept, go outside and look up

Another day of unemployment has been going as one would expect. Time has become a wet bar of soap in a prison shower.

I’m not picking it up.

I’ve accomplished absolutely nothing - full send into uselessness.

Time drifts as listlessly as I rise each day.

Blink. It’s the afternoon.

Blink.

It’s bedtime.

What day is it anyway?

I had just hurriedly shuffled out to the coop with the compost to feed some unruly little cluckers.

They swarmed me like groupies on a rockstar - no boundaries, all beak and bad intentions.

Quick tip my dudes: Protect your peckers. Chickens have no morals.

With the chickens satisfied, I dumped the nasty plastic compost bin in the kitchen sink, then stepped back onto the deck.

BAM.

That’s when it hit me.

That’s right dear reader, I was hit square in the face.

No, it wasn’t an ‘unpleasant truth’ - nor a surprised visit by folks fundraising for orphaned sewer rats

I had just turned to walk into the yard when I was smashed by the most delicious late afternoon sunshine.

It was the kind of sunshine that you notice in the early spring, Sunshine that sneaks out between snowstorms and barely stays - as though it knows it doesn’t belong and would be deported if it lingered.

That early spring sunshine carries with it a special magic.

Eight minutes and twenty seconds prior to that moment, that burning furnace upon which all life depends threw those rays at my face

The heat was intense even at five in the afternoon.

With no wind and warm sun, I ripped off my shirts like a depressed magician pulling out endless handkerchiefs. Ta Da! B.O. and pasty white skin.

Desperate for feeling, any feeling, I let the vitamin D producing waves of energy dance across my skin.

For a moment, I felt summer. It was just a hint, a promise of what’s to come.

Summer brings fewer clothes and more space occupied comfortably.

Everything gets a bit sweatier and a lot easier.

I’m ready for clammy pits and easy living. I’m ready to smell like freedom and tikka masala.

The summer sampler didn’t last long. A wind came up while clouds crossed the sun.

Everything cooled off for a bit.

Hope put its coat back on and went for a lonely walk past some dirty frozen snowbanks with Tims roll up cups froze to them like British teeth.

But, in the time it took me to write this, the sun started screaming through yet again.

If you’re frozen and stuck?

Go find your sun.

Let it hit you.

Let it thaw you.

It’s a gift from eight minutes ago. No invoices. No guilt. Nothing offered in exchange.

Sure, the wind will do its thing.

Clouds will show up.

So what?

But in the middle of your most moist doldrums, the sun’s still there.

Remember how its warmth wakes you and how the breeze dances so playfully with your hairy little nipples.

Sure, those moments will not last.

And?

Neither will winter’s chilling grip.

Remember, dear reader, life is always better without a shirt!

Stay bronze, you fools!