Nonlinear

Beginning: Drink coffee, eat oatmeal, wander outside and pull three bushel baskets full of weeds, and what a well-designed implement it is, the bushel basket - light-weight, just big enough to hold a small load of just about anything indoors or out, handy little wire handles, woven and stapled of strong but not indestructible, almost paper-thin strips of wood. Transplant a few daffodils with spent blooms from a back bed full of daylilies to a smaller bed near the house; water them in. Carry the logs Big Mike and the tree men trimmed from the maple trees back to the woodpile for splitting and drying. Stop for an orange fizz and another piece of pizza. Before you know it, the day's half gone.

Middle: The sun went behind the clouds and came out again. Neighbors ran their riding mowers over their sixteenth-of-an-acre lawns, then they ran their weed whackers around the edges, then they ran their power blowers over the sidewalk. Preteen girls played softball in the field across the street. I looked around and noticed a lot more things blooming: little spikey ajuga, ubiquitous wild violets, vinca starting to spread, and the first big iris of the year, it's all purple. Last week everything was yellow and white, and it's been snowing apple blossoms, and when it's apple blossom time in Orange, California, I know we'll make a peach of a pair. Sitting in the adirondack chair, I actually closed my eyes for a while and took a short nap. Mac called to talk about going to get a load of manure. Timing couldn't be better, now that the beds are nearly weed-free.

End: My second wind came and went, so Gven and I decided to go to an early movie, besides it's the only time "Tristram Shandy" is shown in central swingstate, and lo and behold, we actually got there on time. As a character explains midway through, it's a film of the unfilmable postmodern novel that was written before there was a modern to be post. I knew going in that it would be different, and it didn't disappoint. The narrator/star explains that there was some confusion as to the facts, as in the gruesomely hilarious naming of the unfortunate Trismegistus/Tristram, and I won't even go into his forceps-assisted rhinoplastic delivery, his accidentally window-assisted circumcision, and a series of flashbacks to a swashbuckling forebear's battlefield injury in Flanders, later verified by Agent Scully herself. Be still my heart!

As we strolled Grandview Avenue after the movie, which I was sad to see end so quickly, it was impossible not to recall our early years of childrearing on those same Grandview streets, even while talking about how the film about the novel about the life and opinions worked better because it didn't dwell on every funny line, of which it is full. Beautiful evening of sweet memories, it only seemed right to stop and get a bite to eat. So we sat and ate and unpacked how full the present is too, what with both offspring coming home at some point during May, a couple of important birthdays, my brother's Vandervilt MBA graduation, and our own trip to a family gathering after Memorial Day, it's going to be busy.