Month: March 2022

I’ve been planning our summer adventure in Europe, the remake of the 2020 trip we had to cancel. I have reservations spread out between my email account, Airbnb, Expedia, United Airlines, and EasyJet, so I felt the need this evening to consolidate everything into one document.

I made a copy of the document I created in the winter of 2020 and began replacing the doomed plans with the hopeful new ones. Some of the spots we plan to hit are the same, but much has changed. Instead of nearly three and a half weeks, it’ll be two and half. We’ve scrapped Morocco due to a diminished sense of adventure and greater time constraints. We’re still renting a car and driving down the coast of Portugal and into Spain, but I just don’t have it in me to work in Morocco. I’m telling myself that we’ll make it someday.

The initial impetus to go to Spain is to visit friends of ours who are stationed in Rota, so we’ll stay with them for a few days. We’re just barely making it to them before his change in command the week after we leave.

As I deleted rows and revised dates and places in the new document, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of doubt that this will actually happen. I managed to snap out of it, told that nagging little voice to stow it (where in the world did I pull that Flo reference out of – you know, from Alice?) and aggressively deleted the column I added in May of 2020 entitled “Cancelled/Refund Received.” We won’t be needing that this time.

Spring has officially arrived today, which I hadn’t realized until I started this post. This explains a few things:

1. The hyacinths have bloomed out front, sending their heady, sweet scent floating across the garden.

2. I was compelled to paint my toenails lavender this afternoon.

3. I placed my plant order with Wakefield High School. I selected a mess of herbs and some jalapeño peppers.

Bring on the sun and warmth!

My friend lost her father today. It wasn’t a surprise; they knew he didn’t have much longer, so when the call came from her sisters, she quickly gathered her things and prepared to head out the door.

Before she left, she told the small group of us who had gathered for dinner that she and her sisters knew he had only a few days left and had been musing that today should be the day: March 18. Their mother died on March 18, 1988, her life cut way too short by cancer.

What are the odds that he’d leave this world on the same day in March? I wonder if that was on his mind as he drifted out of this world and maybe toward her?

As the students shuffled in today, some wore green, but it was definitely not a sea of green. A few had green hair and green sparkles on their cheeks, and one student wore a glittery little green hat cocked jauntily to the side.

As two eighth graders passed by, I heard, “It’s Leprechaun Day, bro.”

“What’s Leprechaun Day?”

“Are you dumb? It’s why everyone’s wearing green.”

Hummm. Everyone? Leprechaun Day? I’ll bet a hundred dollars he didn’t know about St. Patrick and the snake legend. Somebody get this boy some Irish soda bread, stat!

Edwin went through an intense ship phase when he was little. He had a wealth of knowledge about the Titanic, Lusitania, Mauritania, Britannic, and the Olympic by the time he was five.

He was so into the Titanic that he dressed as Leonardo DeCaprio’s Jack for Halloween when he was four. He wore a suit and slicked back his hair. He didn’t seem bothered that Jack faces an icy cold death at the end.

Over the years, his interests shifted to buildings and spaceships, but his boats still lined his shelves. I’ve felt a little sad for those boats at times; he had lavished so much time and attention on them in their glory days.

He told me he learned more about the Lusitania in history class today, about how packed full of weapons and ammunition it was when a German torpedo hit it, sinking it in under 11 minutes.

A bit later, as I looked out the back window, I saw him at the pond with his old model of the Lusitania. He packed it with ballast and pushed it out into the middle of the pond. The flame still burns.

I filled out the survey on proposed changes to school start time this evening. I’ve always thought 7:50 is a kind of cruel start time for a middle schooler, especially as they approach eighth grade. Their brains are wired to stay up late and wake up at 8:30 at the earliest. A 9:20 start time would be so much better for them.

One question asks you to check all the potential benefits a later start time would have for students. Additional sleep? Check. Improved mental health? Check. Improved alertness during class? Check. The list continues, and then you’re asked to select the one you want. It’s either the current start time, ten minutes earlier, or 9:20. They might as well ask you why you hate kids so much if you don’t opt for 9:20.

A 9:20 start time would push the end of the school day to 4:20, and then I’d work for at least another hour. I’m all about what’s best for the kids, but…

I guiltily selected the current start time, but I felt better when I read an email from a staff member who pointed out that our kids who plays sports would be competing for facility access with the rest of the county later in the afternoon and evening. In addition, many of our parents are service industry workers whose jobs require an early start time, and currently, many of our students wake up and leave the house when their parents are present. If they had to do this on their own, a spike in truancy and tardiness would be guaranteed.

Yes! I made the right choice, and it wasn’t selfish, after all.

My dog is so slow.

How slow is she?

My dog is so slow that she would lose a race with a snail. My dog is so slow that I actually sprouted two new gray hairs on our evening walk.

Okay, enough of me busting on my dog. I do love her so…but getting her around the block these days feels like an odyssey. She is 12 and has slowed down in her golden years, but it’s no so much her mobility that’s the issue as it is her interest in sniffing every single leaf, her passion for every peed upon blade of grass that holds the secrets of the day’s four-legged voyagers who have come before her.

My neighbor calls dog walks “reading the papers.” They get all the latest news through those amazing sniffers of theirs. I guess Sasha just doesn’t want to miss a word.

The wood fairies showed up today. Chris called me outside to look at how much wood we now had. Two guys, who live in the neighborhood, had shown up in a pickup truck and stacked a bunch of it in our rack.

They must really enjoy chopping wood and also be pretty good at it. I know how physically taxing chopping wood is. Ours wasn’t the only house they stopped at, either. Chris told me they usually over-order, and one of them has a wood splitter. Still.

If I had to pick out two people in our neighborhood with the biggest hearts who find the most joy in being with people, these two would be the ones. During the early days of the quarantine, one of them delivered cups of margaritas from his Jeep on Friday evenings, and the other smoked a bunch of meat and fish on Sunday afternoons and invited people to come pick it up during a distanced backyard happy hour.

Our “village” has had its ups and downs over the 15 – give or take a few – years we’ve been raising kids together, but these two are a big part of the glue that’s kept us together.

Thanks to them, we now have more than enough wood to keep the home fires burning through the last days of winter and chilly days of early spring.

How lucky am I that Edwin can whip up a batch of macarons, light and airy with a subtle chewiness, an Earl Grey buttercream piped between the two halves? I don’t think I had moved past the chocolate chip cookie recipe on the back of the Tollhouse package and Duncan Hines cake mix when I was his age.

It’s been a musical week. Maxine and I went to see HB’s production of 9 to 5: the Musical this evening. She started attending HB this year as a ninth grader, and she has a good friend in the play.

I knew right away this would be special because they had real live musicians in the orchestra pit. Is this normal? Do high schools usually have this? I have a feeling this place has a pretty strong community of alumni and parent volunteers. I’m just starting to dip my toes in.

The play begins and ends with commentary by Dolly herself on a big screen at the back of the stage. As the ensemble launched into their first number, a smile spread on my face and pretty much stayed put for the entirety of the show as they executed their choreographed routines. Some were born to move and others you could see counting in their heads and following their more self-assured peers, but they all put their whole hearts into it.

The leading ladies each brought their own style of charm and talent, and the kid who played Mr. Hart nearly stole the show- he had the prefect blend of smug and smarm. The only kink they need to work out is the sound: the live band, talented as they were, often overpowered the kids’ voices even though they were mic’d up.

When the play ended, the cast broke into whoops and free dancing. I’m still getting choked up watching kids sing, dance, play, express and just live in person after a long, forced pause on their lives.