Ba-Doinnng!

It's spring.

We've survived another dark winter without the addition of psychotropic drugs stronger than the occasional Friday night martini.

Spring has sprung.

In an effort to conserve fuel, legislation passed when crude oil was about $145 a barrel plus your kid sister untethered for the weekend, congress pushed daylight savings time ahead to about Groundhog Day. Laws of unintended consequences being what they are, Phil awoke at six am, found so flipping little shadow, it being still dark, that he hunted around for it and was subsequently shot for food. "Momma, we're a-having fresh possum tonight!" rung out over that valley.

The sun is still shining after six and I'm brought back to dinner in Paris around ten p.m. with another half hour to go until twilight. You felt guilty about eating inside, not wandering around Les Tulieres admiring the bistro chairs piled into configurations that would confound Escher, so you ate outside, de hors where you naturally got placed next to all the other American tourists from just down the road from where you lived, marvelling at the collossal bowl of pudding that showed up when they thought they had ordered another dessert entirely.

But as bright as the sun is, temperatures are still about late thirty something, pushing forty something which brings me mentally to the English countryside, eating cold sausage sandwiches in cold sausage air and reflecting on how they invented a bus, put two different types of lug nuts on the front and rear tires and still managed to survive into the latter part of the twentieth century as a legitimate civilization.

I was at the grocery store last week, weighing fresh vegetables. Yeah, I know. Boy do I live it up. Anyway, the fellow ahead of me took his produce off the scale, said "it doesn't work" in a distinct Eton accent and marched off to have his veggie prices printed out elsewhere. Of course I quickly fixed the scale, earned a compliment and responded to the complimentarian: "He's English, I've seen their engineering."

Spring. Yes, the original theme of this entry. Has sprung and the ensuing additional daylight really is doing little other than illuminating the projects for the summer. Now I'm not complaining, merely observing that the collapsing door to the basement of the barn can be put on the back burner to late May if its alright with you, the garden needing a tilling with the intensity of Shock and Awe taking precedence.

But yeah, the basement of the barn, a space that would put the sauna room of the Knob and Tube palace to shame, needs a new doorway lest this one collapse under the weight of a cat and we can put out one less food dish a night until the howling gets us up at three a.m.

And the gutters need fixed and the fence needs torn down and I'm wondering where that lovely winter, the long dark one with nights spent in front of the computer, tapping in chapters of the next book that won't sell went?
It went.

It went the way of late nights at the office, exhaustion and having to re-boot the entire operating system, crossing yourself when chapters one through four successfully re-loaded and you weren't facing re-writing them for the third time. Besides, summer is why they made porches and laptops.

So here's to spring and the advent of showering normally. In winter I was often reminded of Navy showers (get wet, lather up, rinse off), Texas showers (roll in dewed grass early in the morning with a bar of soap) as I was taking my ritual Maine shower (boil self like lobster) and I'm looking forward to the day I actually turn the cold water tap just a little. Let's forget the cold, the dark, the equity value of the house dropping like a stone and let's look forward to bitching about the heat for a few weeks.

Now THAT'S living!

Bunny on, mes petits lapins.