The flowers above

Do you know why I like those flowers above, those yellow ones standing in the mulch on the top of the page?

Sometime in 2010- I think it might have been Feb- there was a gigantic blizzard in Pittsburgh. It was supposedly among the worst. Snow many feet high, roads closed, no food in the stores- that kind of blizzard. I was pregnant with Ani at that time, maybe 7/8 months along, and desperate to finish up some work for the doctorate before maternity leave.
So the first day of the storm (snow storms are very quiet and mostly peaceful, none of the sound and light effects of a regular Indian thunderstorm), RK took skis and walked 3 miles from our apartment to his residency (he might have been on call). And the second day onwards, so did I. I trudged to lab, bundled up in a few dozen layers, grabbed on to roadside shrubs and hedges on the downhill parts where the road might be slippery, but made it up and down okay. One of the best things about snow is that when it is snowing, the temperature is actually not very cold. It's much better than once the snow has stopped and everything freezes over.

I have no clue what work I did in lab, but I recall amazingly clearly how beautiful it all was: there was snow of so many types on the road and on the trees and leaves: Soft, crunchy, icy, flaky- they were all there! It was completely white, the trees were bending down from the weight of the snow,  there were kids sledding on the sideroads, no traffic whatsoever, and bright red cardinal birds on trees. It was like straight out of a postcard from the 1800s.

Even almost a decade later, I love remembering that pregnancy and those walks in the snow. I might have been waddling like a penguin, perhaps there was some danger of me slipping and falling and breaking something in the snow, but for the most part, what I remember is the calm white peace and the general happiness all around.

So anyway, those flowers up there were the first flowers of spring that I saw that year. They had popped out on the driveway of my favorite Indian restaurant and I took that pic sometime in May, after Ani was born.
 
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Post script:
So, I had a vague recollection of writing a blog around this time and went hunting through the archives for it and found it. Clearly, my recollection now is rather drastically different from what I'd written then. I'm a bit startled by it, to be honest. How odd that what was seemingly so frustrating at that time should be so beautiful now!