This 4-day weekend did not leave me rested up and ready to go back to work. No, actually, while it left me fairly rested up, all it did was make me long for vacation. Long for long days of doing nothing much, of sitting on the porch in the sunshine, grumbling about the flies. Today was beautiful, 72 and sunny just like southern California. I went for a walk, my 3rd in 3 days by myself, because the kids are playing with friends from morning to night, zooming in to raid the cookie jar and eat homemade grape/apple popsicles and disappearing again in a herd of bicycles.
I rounded the neighborhood on the undulating path behind the daycare and suddenly the air was full of tiny white floating fluffbits. It almost looked like snow! They were all drifting sideways, a constant wave of them on the air, and as I came around the corner I realized that they were the fluffsplosions of blooming pussywillows. Yesterday it rained until early evening and the slugs and snails were out in full force, today, since it had dried up, they weren’t much in existence. I saw green caterpillers humping along the road and a stone wall completely covered with a green net polkadotted with tiny, tiny violets.
I had to get up just now and go get me one o’ them grape/apple popsicles to see if they were any good. O! Are they ever! I will have to fight the kids for them now. I shall make them all summer long.
I made them with Tupperware popsicle holders…how they take me back to my own childhood! I can’t simply suck on a popsicle. I start out with the best of intentions, thinking this time I’ll make it last, but after only a couple of licks I’m crunching into it, taking big, purple, brain-freezing bites, stopping only now and then to suck the juice out of the ice until it turns white and then crunching another bite. Crunch, crunch crunch! They are so cold and so good! I am having another, and my tongue is probably purple.
Photo by Anders Ek