Yesterday was Earth Day.

On Earth Day last year, my wife Katie and I put an offer on a house in Florida. It had been a whirlwind of a year. Katie’s mother passed away, I accepted a job that would carry us to another part of the country, we would have to pack and move from a house with over three acres of land, and we started talking about putting an online literary journal together. Our days then were filled with laughter and crying, our moods as erratic as the upstate NY winds we had grown accustomed to. One moment we sat planning our future rooms, talking about the amount of golf and tennis we would play in a warmer climate, and the next moment we were lamenting the loss of the birds we fed in the front yard, our friends we were leaving behind. We were even struggling with the magazine, working on it sporadically, second-guessing whether Sweet would ever come into being. It is the reason I’ve waited until now to write an Editor’s Note. I wanted to see if Sweet would make it past the first issue, whether it would have the momentum to carry on for years, and not peter out like so many online literary magazines before it.

At this time last year, I remember how relieved we were, after two days of intensive house hunting, to put an offer on a house that had less land but made up for it with a large pool. To celebrate our offer, Katie and I headed for the beach. Honeymoon Island State Park was having its Earth Day Celebration, and we walked the booths, eating fried seafood and sweet potato fries with cinnamon and butter. Eventually we found a trail and decided a short walk would do us good. There, atop thick clumps of trees, ospreys sat in a line, the breeze gently rocking their perches. We counted them, at least fourteen. They swooped from one tree to the next until they headed toward the gulf in search of fish. In William Butler Yeats’ long poem, “The Wanderings of Oisin,” the osprey was the bird of sorrow, but sorrow was not what we felt. We felt possibility. We felt change, and change, in this one moment, felt good, felt like flight. In the days and months to come we would feel the pressures of change, and we would have our moments of doubt, but at that instant, on Earth Day, as the ospreys took flight, we embraced our new lives.

Yesterday, I sat down to write the first Editor’s Note for Sweet. Change is what I thought about. Change is what the writers in this issue grapple with, change that’s painful, sensual, vulnerable, experimental, revelatory. Lucky for us, change can also be sweet. Like our latest change, brought about by our new webmaster and poetry reader, Andrew Brogdon, who has transformed our site. It’s a Metamorphosis.

OK, now go read Kafka.