THIS is a very interesting article about plastic bags.

I have recently become very passionate about eliminating plastic from the world. Plastic does not biodegrade, and suddenly, one morning as I threw a piece of plastic in the garbage, it occured to me that all of this plastic was going to go SOMEWHERE and sit there. It felt enormous. To be ever-so-slightly dramatic (and I swear I am not wearing tie-dyed anything right now) I almost felt the earth weeping.

I imagined it filling up our forests and rivers and oceans, plastic bags flying everywhere like so many leaves. So although, yes, there are people dying all across the world and horrible things happening, far worse than plastic bags, I am bringing it up.

I think many times we use all the horrible things happening in the world as an excuse the keep throwing away plastic. "It's not important considering..." we say. But it is. And by forgetting the little things, we soon forget the big things. There are a million tiny things we can do every day to better our world. It is the little things, in fact, that add up to create something wonderful or something horrilble. Think of icicles and fossils and ants making ant hills all over your front yard.

Across the street, in the creek that winds through my town, there is a beaver who is trying his darndest to build a dam. If the dam goes in, it'll screw up the whole creek, and the city workers know this. They keep tearing down the beaver's work. There are teeth marks on many trunks along the creek for, from what I can see, miles. They have had to put netting around dozens and dozens of trees along the edge of the creek, so he doesn't chew them down, which I'm sure has been a lot of work for them. When we walk by, we laugh. I guess that's where the saying 'buisy little beaver' comes from.

One little, insignificant beaver, has caused such a stir.

So the next time you cause yet another plastic bag to be thrown into the universe, think of that beaver. The little, seemingly insignificant thing you can do is ask for paper bags at the grocery store, get a travel mug for your to-go coffees (you even get a discount sometimes), and, as they say, reduce, re-use, recycle.

Okay. I'm down. That's really all I had to say.

It seemed like spring was here. I've been riding my bike again now on the bare, dry roads. Riding a bike again for the first time after a long winter feels so good, almost like I could lift off into the sky like they did on E.T. Fly over all the buildings and the trees.

But today, snowflakes started to come down again, lightly at first, and then some more, until the whole sky was filled with the wretched things.

The woodpecker is back. He was here last year when we moved in, knocking furiously on the neighbor's chimney pipe, day in and day out, and he's back again, at the same house. He seems to never rest, and I can't imagine what it must sound like inside the house. I imagine the owners plotting ways in which to kill it, becoming more and more violent as the days go on. I wonder if it keeps them awake at night. Even with my windows closed, I can hear it in every room.

My little girls are beautiful together now. Ella can say a few words, nods and shakes her head, laughs at Iryn's bizarre antics. In the afternoons, they sit on the couch eating popsickles, side by side, and I find myself a little jealous, wondering what it would've been like to grow up with a sister in my life.

Maybe not much different. I dressed my little brother up in girls' clothes and painted his nails, like all good sisters do.

Sometimes Iryn is afraid to go down the hall to the the bathroom by herself so she asks Ella to come with her. They reach out to each other and walk hand in hand down the semi dark hallway. It is the most perfect thing.

I dreamed of Kelowna the other night. I dreamed I was outside the public library downtown and it was spring, and I was running down the sidewalk with the sun shining.

They say that you have become fluent in a language when you begin to think in that language. I think that when you begin dreaming of a new town, that town has become home in even the smallest way. I feel settled here, if only for a while. I walk around these streets now like I have been here always, and it is good to not feel like such a stranger, though I still get little aches for the places of my past, but it doesn't hurt like it once did.

Now the snow has stopped and all the roads are wet. The sun is out a little again, behind the bare grey trees, and it feels like everything is on the edge, waiting to open any minute now.