This week, for the first time in a very long time – close to a year, I heard myself laugh again, a full out bellowing laugh that came and went for the better part of an hour. This big throaty, head back, mouth open wide, full-body kind of laugh was, and is, a glorious restorative precious thing. It felt so easy, like finding something that was just hiding in the back of my closet I wasn’t even looking for, a long-lost favorite treasure. I didn’t analyze it as it was happening. I rolled with it fully and with abandon. The next morning, I began to marvel at the ease with which this particular kind of joy returned. Eight months or more joy had been missing, dormant, absent. And just like that, just as spring is exploding all around me, so too am I emerging from a long dark cold miserable season, hand in hand with joy apparently.