I am not ready for this! Last weekend? Monday and Tuesday morning? Zero degrees. I had to wear my balaclava and snowpants and a polartech vest under both layers of my ski jacket. Today? I could’ve gotten away with shorts! I didn’t have to go out and start my vee-hickle 10 minutes before I left this morning to get the windows de-iced without scraping. There was no way I could’ve picked up perishable grokkeries at Whole Foods during lunch and left them in my vee-hickle for the afternoon. I have the Landfill kitchen window open. I cannot for the life of me figger why anyone felt as if we needed to turn the furnace up this afternoon. Don’t be envious. I’m sure we’ll be taking the escalator back down into the deep freeze a few more times.

No, the flower is not from today. About the earliest I remember the flowering trees bloom was late April. Right after Mouse was born back in 1987. We still have lumps of blackened snow around here and I haven’t even seen a crocus yet. It’ll be a while. I went in to work early today. So I could leave a little early so we could go to Joan’s funeral. The flower is for her. An album of pictures down at Muehlig’s was filled with pictures of flowers, as was their back yard most of the years that we’ve lived here. By comparison, our back yard is always a weedy, mossy mess.

We never spent a whole lot of time with the neighbors whose house is probably less than 20 feet from ours. But we were friendly and you get to know what people are all about after 25 years. These people were fun. They were all about partying in the back yard. There were all the fireworks “wars” between Chris and the GG back in the day. There was the time Chris helped extract Mouse’s neck from a precarious position between the seats of a broken glider swing (you guys, I was at work when this happened). There was the time the bomb squad came to take the dynamite away. I could go on. There weren’t a whole lot of people at the funeral home when we paid our visit and we didn’t know anyone there. We paid our respects by looking at the afore-mentioned photo album showing our neighbors having fun. Traveling. In their back yard. Wherever. I’ll bet that wherever they are now, they are having a great time again. I, who all those years was always busy busy busy with one career or another and kids and property “up north” and our beloved extended families, think that I will miss them very much. I said this the other day but once again, farewell!

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