The days had been too cool. He wanted his first repose on his favorite bench for this calendar year to be warm and relaxed. So, as he descended the stairs from the footbridge, he looked out across the brown grass and the blue water with both hope and expectation. The hope he felt was innate, the bred into his blood hope of a farmer at the first breath of spring, the irrepressible and reckless assumption that thawed earth and warming temperatures guaranteed germination, growth, and new life. The expectation he harbored was both new to him and more complicated, reliant as it was on the resilience of his spirit and the resourcefulness of his imagination.