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Another note: I am arbitrarily announcing that the challenge will not be over till I announce the winner on Monday.  So forget the old deadline.  I just keep hoping more courage will surface.

1).  April 3: Can anybody please explain to me what’s up with this?  Daddy?  Are airplanes supposed to get this close together?  Or were they having a party up there, a sport of plane-dance?

And while I’m asking – Steve, would you clean my camera?  Those spots aren’t on the lens.

2)  Sunday last: married 33 years.  If  you can actually get your head around the size of thirty three years, please raise your hand.

Given about two weeks’ notice, my sister made my dress.  You can’t see, but it’s all this really silky stuff, pin-tucked and pearl-buttoned.  Yes.  I was kind of a hippie, but the flowers are really the Shakespearean heart of me.  He has to answer for the wide-legged pants himself.

3)  On Sunday,  I wrote:

Yesterday, the tree beside the front door was full of bees.  Its leaf-blossoms are heavy at the tips of each tiny twig, and it seems that bees – real, honest to goodness honey bees, love them.  I saw a wasp or two up there, also – them, I am not so glad to see.  I noticed when Chaz was leaving, after helping me peel twenty potatoes for Rachel’s Mr. B’s Prom night.  We did it early in the day, and she was on her way home when we stopped just outside the front door.  My ears cocked.

Bee magnets.  In the background, lumps of Christmas lights.

It sounded like we were standing next to a huge hive.  “What?” she said.  But I am finely tuned to the sound of buzzing, after that wasp-swarm we survived some twelve years ago now.  I pointed.  She saw.  Then she heard.

I didn’t expect sun yesterday (that’d be last Saturday – the sky has repented of that largess since), but we got it.  So I fertilized the pasture, trudging back and forth across the entire acre+, spreading tiny white balls of food for the grass.  And I took down the Christmas lights – finally.

Signs of spring.  Color.

4)  When I was a kid, the very cool automotive thing  was white-wall tires.  You’d get a Thunderbird with a removable top and white-walls.  Which just meant that your tire had a broad white stripe on the outside, like your hub cap was the middle of a bull’s eye.  Not sure what made that cool; for one thing, it was really hard to keep those white stripes clean.  True— so many of the status things in the history of the world seem to have hinged on how clean your stuff was kept and how difficult it was to keep it that way (thus you need servants and money, in other words).

But things change.  Now when guys come back into town with their SUVs covered in mountain-climbing mud, they’re in no hurry to hit the car wash.  They park their vigorous vehicles in public places the way our girls wear their Prom dresses and flowers to church the next day (assuming the dresses were modest to begin with).  And chances are, if the truly leisure class can find a sparkling clean Eddie Bauer edition SUV to park next to, they will.  With glee.

We’re not coming over there till we know there’s something in it for us.

All this is just to say that, having dreamed of horses all my life, I realized, walking up to my good old maroon Suburban 3500 – I have something even more amazing than white walls.  I have manure-walls.

Dreams do come true.

5)

On Tuesday, Gin sent me my birthday present.  Way early.  Weeks early.  But just in time.  At nine o’clock in the morning, I answered the door only to find two total strangers – toting buckets and mops and even a vacuum cleaner.

Can you see the very sad dog?  The exiled son of the house?  This is what comes of letting strange vacuums into the house.

Five woman-hours of dusting and cob-web catching and setting to rights. All while I was finishing up the last images for this year’s photo book.  A long distance bit of pitching in, even as Gin was starting to unpack a million boxes in her own new house.  So having children does pay off, in case you’ve ever wondered.  What a girl

Eighth grade flute wiz wins special award.  I got my trophy the day she was born.