just talking about the weather.

Sometimes it’s easier to talk about the weather.

It’s commonplace in Minnesota. I haven’t lived anywhere else (at least not for long, outside of business and personal travel), so I’m not sure if it’s the same everywhere else. Probably is.

Anyway. It was in the mid-seventies this weekend. We are supposed to get snow, again, overnight. It is such an odd spring. Kind of like winter just doesn’t want to let go.

The snow is nearly gone from our yard – remaining just in-front of the rock garden in the front yard, where the shadow of the house falls. (Our home faces north, so our snow is some of the last in the neighborhood to finally go.)  I have been looking forward to it being all the way gone – hopefully the colder temperatures won’t kill the grass off. It was finally starting to green up.

It was nice to have the warmer weather over the weekend. Felt so good to open the casements and feel the breeze flow through the house. Be able to walk outside without a jacket – without shoes, even.

Jayan found our abandoned snow rake from earlier in the week and had great fun pushing it around the yard. He was pretty fast. He said he was “pushing the leaves.” (Half the oaks lose their leaves in the fall and the other half in the spring, so there were lots of leaves to push around.) He circled the house, barefoot – just he and the snow rake. He lapped the house several times until he finally quit, wet with sweat, feet filthy.

But, he had a good time. And had really good exercise, especially considering we live on a hilly lot. :)

I keep checking on the hostas I planted last fall to see if they come back. I hope so. I planted a row of them to flank our house in the area where we just can’t grow grass last fall, just to see how they would do.

Our house is on the inside of a circle, so like Kate at Retro Ranch Revamp alluded with her own yard, it’s kind of like having two front yards. The problem? Is that our side yard is sadly neglected and doesn’t get good light, either, so we’re pretty clueless as to what to do with it. (Not a very welcoming front yard!)

So, I debate filling the whole area with hostas. I love them – they love shade. Maybe it will be a win win? Plus, less mowing, especially on the hillside. The neighbor boys like to play in our trees, there – I would hate to plant hostas around the trees, only to have them trampled. Benefits to having a fence, but our neighborhood is decidedly “fence free,” at least for us on the “inner circle” and I wouldn’t want to be the first one to add it.

I suppose I can add the hostas to the side yard, anyway. See what happens. Worry about it afterwards?

Looking forward to doing lots more landscaping this year. (And hopefully painting our house! I have been looking at color combinations for three years! It drives my husband nuts. :)) Our house has no landscaping whatsoever in the front yard and just looks a little sad. A few colorful planters and some actual plants in our beds will help! We were thinking that some hydrangeas would look good in-front of our house. We need something, put it that way.

I wish I wasn’t garden clueless. This summer will be good to actually go to the greenhouse and ask for recommendations.

Once it stops snowing, anyway.

waking up, again.

It is absolutely beautiful outside, today. It was yesterday, too.

So hard to believe that there were six inches of snow on the ground Tuesday morning. I took a picture of it that morning, through my car window, as I was pulling out of my driveway. My best girlfriend from work, Beth, told me she did the same. As did quite a few others.

My girlfriend Maria told me over breakfast Saturday that that morning, she was digging her car out, alongside a neighbor in her building who was not happy at all to be moving snow. “I took on her energy,” she told me, as she sipped her coffee. “I started out okay, but by the time I started driving, I was so cranky and bitter!”

But then, she went on, traffic slowed to a stop. She was livid. But it gave her time to look and really see – she said just at that moment, light poured through the snow covered trees and it was just spectacular. She felt lucky to have seen that and it changed her whole outlook.

The past few days have been in the high seventies. (Welcome to Minnesota.) I think the late snow has helped so many people appreciate the spring weather so much more-so. It’s like the whole neighborhood is waking up after hibernating over the winter – I spent 40 minutes Friday evening chatting with my next-door neighbor Nancy, who I hadn’t talked with since probably last November, before the snow fell.

There is a new house up for sale down the block and I heard that the nice two-story house across from us will be going up for sale in the next few weeks. The house across from us that just sold is slowly being moved out of – I heard that a family is moving in with two children. It will be nice to have more kids around.

Hopefully the people that move in take care of their houses – there are a few houses at the entrance to our neighborhood that just aren’t maintained well from the curb and because it’s at the entrance to the neighborhood, you can’t see how nice of a neighborhood ours is until you drive in further. (By the say, is there a nice way to tell your neighbor, “If you’re hoping that someone will take your junk off your hands, it helps to put a FREE sign on it”?)

So here’s hoping.

My husband and his cousin took Jayan to the driving range this afternoon. (Jayan loves golf and hitting balls.) He should enjoy it, provided he is patient enough to let someone else swing. :) It’s good for them to do things on their own, every once in a while.

I have my own cousin’s funeral tomorrow. He passed away at 41 following esophageal cancer. He was an amazing man and was a great example as to the impact that a positive outlook and an outward energy can bring to others. I am saddened by the loss of a wonderful individual, but am happy in that his downturn was relatively short in comparison to all of the living he did in the past seven months since his cancer was deemed terminal. He truly lived without regrets – something that I think we all can strive to do in our lives, however long or short.

building sand castles.

“You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander…I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.”

~ Anne Lamott

paradise by the dashboard light.

We sat on the floor, stocking feet stretched out, long and lean. Backs against the bunk bed mattress. There was another set of bunks across from us; the space between the beds were narrow, so much so that our feet tucked in the space under the other bed.

We were more friends than we were romantic, although at the time, I had tried to see otherwise.

I remember the beds were unmade. My mom was always insistent that we make our beds at home, but there were nine kids here, so maybe it was tougher to stay on top of. I wouldn’t have made my own bed, had my mom not nagged on me.

My mom would have been pissed if she knew I was in his bedroom, but his mom, she didn’t mind.

The recording was warm – records were always so much warmer feeling than cassettes or CD’s. His car had an 8-track player, something that I gave him a hard time about. I could never catch a record at the right place to listen to the beginning of a song – skipping into mid-lyric. But he could catch this one perfect.

It was a single – we listened to it over and over.

Paradise by the Dashboard Light

He told me how when he was younger, how much his mom loved this song.

I was seventeen and thought I knew so much, but I really didn’t. So much of life that I had been sheltered from.

I could never understand how something like that could happen to a little kid. I still can’t.

He was eight when he came to live with this family, who later went on to adopt him and his brother. A foster family had joined their seven-person household just shortly after I had gotten to know him,expanding their household to eleven – their house was always chaos.

But, at this moment, things were calm. The record played, warm and scratchy, filling the spaces where there were no words. We talked about finishing school and what would happen next year, once he graduated. He had wanted to be a graphic designer one day, but he told me what he really wanted was to find his mom. Now that he was eighteen, he could.

He was so young, at the time everything happened, that he didn’t remember the town where she lived, but that there was a grandfather who stayed with them. While he was around, things were okay. But then, he went away, and everything changed.

His mom’s troubles with alcohol and drugs; a boyfriend who didn’t want other men’s kids around.

Beatings. Being burned with an iron and boiling water.

Trying to protect his mom, but not being able to. Being a pain in the ass, so the he would take the brunt of the boyfriend’s anger, versus his mom or his little brother.

He was seven.

“If I saw him walking down the street, I would kill him,” he confided to me, in the deeper voice he still hadn’t quite grown into. “I wouldn’t even think twice about it.”

One of the foster brothers broke in. Flopped on one of the lower bunks. Teased me about something I can’t remember, anymore. They rough housed. I played awkward, although I was used to this sort of thing, having lots of younger brothers, myself.

It was enough to cut the tension.

Things were normal, again.

…

I have not seen him, now, for seventeen plus years. We stayed in-touch for a while, but once I was not interested in a relationship, anymore, it got weird.

There was too much need, there and, cruel as it was, I had moved on and wasn’t interested in helping a broken person, anymore.

He did find his mom and moved in with her for a time. I can’t imagine that it went well, but at least he now knew.

How hard would it be to have this one dream and to find out the dream you had wasn’t what you thought it would be?

I heard from my mom, a few years later, that he had been arrested for breaking into a house. It was reported in our small town newspaper. That’s how she found out.

The police report had said there was nothing taken – the house was empty for the winter and that he had broken in through a sliding door. He was inside when someone came by to check on the house.

His car was found broken down not far from there.

He was homeless. His car broke down. He needed a warm place to stay.

It was like hearing about a random person, not someone I used to spend time with. Not someone I knew.

…

I wonder from time to time whether he is okay. Whether he was sucked into the habits that his mom had – the drugs, the alcohol. I wonder if he is still broken, like he was, or if he finally was able to find some sort of stability.

I wonder, but I don’t want to know, at the same time. It’s an awful way to be – to care, but to not care.

But that’s how it feels. Numb. Like I had known of him, but hadn’t known him at all. Not really.

Never at all.

the root of the root.

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

 

- ee cummings, from i carry your heart with me

looking forward.

It was a warmer day, today. Relatively speaking. Last year, at this time, it was one of the warmest months on record – ever – in Minnesota – I think on the radio this morning, the weather person said it was forty degrees below than this day last year.

Needless to say, our house faces north, so our yard is one of the last in the neighborhood to thaw. Our roof is still covered with a heap of snow. Our driveway has gotten narrower and narrower as the winter passes on and is, at current, about a car and a half width wide, rather than two full lanes.

I’m looking forward to that moment when the snow is gone, past the point when the ground is spongy with moisture. Where you can take a walk without a coat and smell the damp freshness in the air, see the florescent sprigs of new grass dot the lawn.

I have things that I’m looking forward to doing. I want to paint our house – possibly a greenish-gray color. Maybe a deep bronze brown. I’m not completely sure of the color, just yet. I just know that I am itching to do it. We have had some flecks of paint come off when we pressure washed last and the “undone”-ness of that bothers me.

Honestly, our house needs some TLC outside. It needs a really good pressure wash to get the dirt from under the eaves – we’ll need to have a ladder to get in-range this time. We need to caulk some things. To paint some things. To plant some things. I would love to have some flowers this year – maybe zinnias?

Inside, I bought some new curtains for in the living room. I bought some traditional double-width velvet panels in a pretty brown the color of hot chocolate mix. I am now pretty much convinced that the deep gray walls are not right for me, but I have no clue what to use, instead.

I have been pinning Spanish-inspired interiors – a look that I have always loved. A fairly traditional look, but with lots of pattern. I know that Spanish style was popular in mid-century homes and I can just tell that it would compliment our home well. I’m waiting a bit for the pieces to come together – my taste fluctuates so much that I want to make sure I’m really in-love with the concept before I give myself the go-ahead.

Looking forward to spring.

so-far this morning.

So-far, this morning, Jayan has asked for Mommy to make him a fishing pole (with a hook), Daddy to make him a periscope and for Daddy to buy him a whistle.

And it’s ten after ten.

making a list. or not.

I was writing up a post, yesterday, about all of the things I needed to do around the house. I had found the January Cure at Apartment Therapy (in February, oh, well.) and thought, hey, a list is always a good way for me to stay on-track!

But, the list, it was long and today was longer and just looking at the list? Makes me kind of tired.

So, the list? I suppose will be for another day. I have a lot of little things (and big things) that would go a long way toward making our house just a little bit better. But some of those things can wait.

My daily life at the office has been challenging. Just lots of things going on and feeling overwhelmed. Nothing out of the ordinary for me, I suppose. I’m a bit of a high-strung person, so I worry when worry isn’t always necessary.

Don’t we all?

Anyway. So my time, here, at home? I’m just savoring it before I dive back in, again, tomorrow.

Which makes it all the more sweet when home is a place where you can look around and not see more things that need to be done. But…there are a fair number of things that I have done, where I can see progress.

I’m not sure how “normal” this is, but I’m always noticing how much the things in the background of our photos have changed – that the wall is a different color, or how we have a different table or that the window coverings we used to have really, really, did not match the paint on the walls. :) (There were fights about this.)

I suppose it’s a little fickle, being that it’s really physical things changing that I notice and that’s, clearly, not what a home is about, but it is gratifying to see progress. To see that little changes over a period of time can make a big difference to the feel and function of your house.

So, the list of to-do’s? That’s for another day. But I think it would be good to write things down and check things off – maybe with a date? It will make me seem so much more productive than I feel.

side note.

Is this becoming a “mom blog”? Because, really, I am not very maternal by-nature and that would be funny.

I will say, though, that there has been no biting at daycare in a week. So, that’s good. (My child, he is the biter, in case you were wondering.) It’s a completely frustrating situation, because he just bites this one girl and her mom is insistent that a boy his age should know not to bite.

Sigh.

We are figuring that it might be due to his frustrations with speech. We have a visit with our pediatrician scheduled, so hopefully will have a game plan figured out, soon. Totally not trying to be flippant about this other mom’s concerns, because, hello, if the roles were reversed, I would have a problem, too.

I guess we’ll get it figured out, eventually. We will see if the pediatrician has any recommendations about the biting.

number two.

My little boy went #2 on the toilet today.

This is big news.

So proud of my little guy!