Spring is a riot!

 Do you like classical music?  I’m not a serious student of music, but I like the quieter pieces.  CD’s I buy are usually piano pieces by Chopin, Liszt or Debussy.  Igor Stravinsky is not my type, but his piece “Spring” from his suite “The Four Seasons” is a composition I understand, if not actually like listening to.

Stravinsky is trying to express the energy of Spring with a dis-harmonic cacophony of sounds from the orchestra.  Spring is such a busy season in Nature.  Winter is being flung away, to be discarded like the dirty leaves that have accumulated around my SW Florida home.  Mocking birds are having a war of notes over who gets to preside over the neighborhood from the prized location of the top of the life oak tree.  The Honey Bell orange tree next door is pushing new buds out while still trying to ripen the remaining fruit from last year.  Orchid trees, Jacaranda, azalea, and the acres of citrus groves around me are straining to begin new growth.  Even insects are beginning renewed life.  I see many honey bees and the annoying ant hills are appearing again.

You can just feel the push, push, push and rush to get on with living life renewed.

A Stickler is a Stickler

At last, I’m reading “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” by Lynne Truss c. 2003.  What fun!  I am indeed a stickler – at least on some issues.  Ms Truss validates my inner need to ‘fix’ things I think are done wrong.  I do ink in a missing apostrophe or change ‘there’ to ‘their’ in a sign – at least if I can reach it with the pen I keep in my purse.  I just can’t help myself!  I try to do it on the sly though.  I even go so far as to change the direction of a toilet paper roll in a public place if I don’t’ think it is hung ‘right’.  A close friend admitted to doing the same surreptitiously.  Wouldn’t you know any close friend of mine would be a stickler too? 

Once, I worked in a large office building which had the familiar stick-like figures on each restroom door to indicate men and women.  All the women figures had no heads.  A secret misogynist had slyly went around and scraped off the part of the decal for the woman’s head.  Is there was a message there??   

inside a city

Peculiar how memories flit in and out of my old brain.  Talking to my daughter in St.Louis, I was reminded of the strange, little quiet, pocket neighborhoods you can find hidden in a big metro area.  If any of you have lived in a large city for any span of time, you’ll know what I’m about to describe. 

These areas are usually isolated bits of two or three blocks of older homes of mixed architectural styles, – maybe tucked in behind an interstate highway and cut away from the rest of the community they used to belong to.  They almost turn into a small town of their own.  Dogs can wander freely.  Kids play ball in the street.  Men can work on their cars right at the curb.  There may be a small convenience store or tavern still left from older times.  A town within a big city.  -  An anachronism.  

Begger, begger

Pet owners will understand when I say I’m silly over my doggies.  Yesterday, one year old Sophie got what she wanted without me asking her.  Huh?  Does that make sense? Here’s the scene:

I was sitting in my rocker with my laptop concentrating on an email.  I was a bit hungry so had gotten a slice of cheese to nibble on.  Sophie was playing with a toy.  Then, I noticed her from the corner of my eye and she was completely still.  That’s not normal.  I looked directly at her.  She was sitting straight up on her little hind-end looking at me with those begging eyes. 

Of course, I got the hint and she got the cheese.  It made me laugh.  We’ve been teaching her to sit up for a treat when we use the word “sit up”.  This time, I hadn’t said anything.  I was ignoring her.  But, she knew what she needed to do.  She just had to wait for her human to catch on.  -  Ahh, my pets always make me smile.  What funny things do your pets do? 

A cliché by any other name is still a cliché.

   Watching the sun rise this morning, coffee in hand, the sky really is a rose gray .  Like the color gray  of a mourning dove.  Rosy gray.  ….”the rosy fingers of dawn”…..Actually, we are going to have a foggy morning here in SW Florida – typical of late winter.  The sun will burn through by mid-morning. 

As I write the above, I can see my old English Prof hovering above me, red pen in hand.  He hated, hated, hated clichés.  Rhetoric 101 is where I realized how much of my speech was littered with clichés and proverbs.  I’m a late bloomer.  By the time I was sitting in Rhetoric 101, I was already a grandmother.  So – as the cliché says – better late than never! 

Was it the author Taylor Caldwell who wrote about some southern characters whose speech is cluttered with all those old proverbs?  When I read that short story I thought “Gad! Those women sound just like me”  I’d sure hate to have to listen to me for very long. 

memory connections

Scientists are studying how the brain works and how we remember things.  Some day, they’ll be able to tell us just why the smell of sweet potatoes baking remind us of Aunt Jane’s kitchen.   Once I’m back in that kitchen, other memories flood in.  I can see her gingham curtains, pet her black cocker spaniel and see my cousins (long dead) again. 

A tour of a antique shop is as much fun as a museum, but one where I can touch the exhibits.  My favorite items are kitchen utensils and children’s books. 

I was reminded of one of my favorite children’s book at the last campground I was in.  A neighbors’ small dog was so funny and cute.  Checkers was 8 inches high by about 20 inches long.  His head was brindled black and brown and he has long ears.  Maybe he has some mini-doxie in him?  His body is mostly white.  Nice white tail to wag at me. 

Seeing Checkers brought my mind to my childhood book.  This book was of cartoon like animals.  Each page was divided into three strips.  Top was animal heads, middle was the torso and the bottom legs and feet.  I could flip the strips to create a giraffe head with lion body and elephant legs.  Or flip other strips to create even odder creatures.  The fun was in seeing odd pieces put together, rather like Checkers.               Thanks Checkers for the memories. 

A fowl day

It was a foul/fowl day either way you spell it.  There was enough dry time in the morning to get the doggies out, but then it rained, rained, rained and rained as though trying to catch up on the drought moaned about about the TV talking heads. 

In this campground most people just stayed in like I did, finding ways to twiddle away the day.  I spent much of the day knitting sox and looking through the windshield of my RV to see if there was any activity.  The pet ducks, as you'd imagine, were delighted!  Instead of only the kiddie pool they normally were confined to - the gods had turned the entire campground into a series of private lakes solely for their pleasure!  They could paddle anywhere, shaking their tails in joy and poking their yellow bills into the muck for delectable morsels.  

The feral chickens, on the other hand, surely cursed these same gods for forcing them to be stranded on the high land of a picnic table to protect their chicken feet from the water.  Today they couldn't bully the ducks as they usually did. 

My grandmother would say "Every dog has his day".  This was a day of "Every duck has his day".