Chocolate is the root of all good things

 I’m sitting here at my writing desk looking for inspiration in the tiny ball chocolates wrapped in tinfoil that were left over from the annual Easter Egg Hunt held here almost a month ago.

Perhaps I should clarify and fess up. The chocolates weren’t exactly “leftovers.” I stashed a few (okay maybe more) handfuls of them in the cupboard just for me—and up high enough that one had to stand on a chair to reach them.

And just the other day I also found a few wayward plastic eggs strewn about the farm yard still with chocolates balls inside. The grandchildren missed these when they were running around that day like the break after the eight-ball, bouncing off bushes and tree stumps in search of sweet treasures.

I ate all the contents of those eggs too—even the contents of the one I found splayed open on the ground. So what if the tinfoil was muddy. The chocolate inside of that was perfectly fine. It wasn’t until I popped it in my mouth and bit into it did I wonder if my resident nemesis squirrel had purposely opened the egg, taken the chocolate ball out, rolled it around in the dirt and put it back—just to spite me—knowing full well and that I would eat it anyway.

Let’s face it. Chocolate fixes everything—always has, always will—and it certainly is making it easier for me to tolerate the dragging carcass of cool weather that I liken to Chinese water torture—slow and relentless.

I keep trying to pack away my wool sweaters but they just won’t let go. I’ve gone so far as to have a “Yosemite Sam” temper tantrum that involved stomping my woolies flat under my feet before I throwing them fitfully down the stairs to the basement—only to look down and see the big sweater dragging itself back up the stairs as I scolded it like a small child for even thinking I would wear it again before next December.

Maybe if I eat more chocolate warm weather will come quicker.

The trouble is, now I have a fiancée who is an equally enamored chocoholic and the proportions of said “fixer of all my problems” isn’t as big as it used to be.

Does this mean I have to share?

Doesn’t he know how much chocolate is required by the “love of his life” in order to keep the peace?

Come to think of it, does he even know how much I like to eat and that I’ve been known to consume (albeit not all at once) a whole pizza by myself, a box of Kraft Dinner, all four servings of chocolate pudding, or vacuum up a large bag of potato chips and a vat of sour cream in between television commercials?

Oh no. Does this mean I have to share the TV remote too? 

This is definitely going to require more chocolate on my half of the coffee table.

Spring hatches memories of yesterday

You never really know how much poop a dog puts out until the snow melts. 

And when it comes time to clean up, nobody – not even my vigorous, dive-into-anything grandchildren want to make that extra five bucks cleaning up dog poop. 

It seems they’d rather have a week’s worth of extra household chores added to their list (without remuneration) or be made to eat a plate of vegetables they detest, than to spend time with a shovel and plastic bag scooping up the wet, soggy, smelly droppings of the canine. Go figure.

The snow is all but gone—at least for today. And despite the jokers posting cartoons on Facebook of “Canadian Spring” that shows a guy in a t-shirt on Monday and encased in a snowsuit by Wednesday, I am clearing my slate for the upcoming weekend, which I predict to be the crack that sends Old Man Winter packing his bag of chills. 

With each successive day where temperatures hover around the melting point, I think about my childhood—like the days of black rubbers with the red stripe, called “pig boots” used in robust playing fields called puddles.  

The waters of Frog Creek would start low in the spring and then rise with May showers. In those days, I wanted to be a hundred things when I grew up, one of which was a biologist. (Come to think of it, I still want to be 100 things.)

I would venture out along the bending and withered creek in search of treasures. I’d plunk along in my pig boots picking up tidbit souvenirs uncovered by spring--bird feathers, clam shells, and amputated crayfish pinchers—leftovers from the seagull’s meal.

The pinchers were beautiful to me, nature’s pencil crayons of deep green or fire red, small and fat, and long and sharp that, to a country kid, were a collector’s item. I stored all these marvels together in an old shoebox under my bed where I’d forget about the collection for a month or two.

Needless to say the fermented stench of rotting crayfish parts, clam shells and the like, left my bedroom smelling pretty bad when I finally lifted the lid.

Thawing gravel roads gave way to delightful eruptions of mud that sucked in the handles of broken hockey sticks we had that made great tools for exploring these mucky holes. We shoved them down as far as they would go—to the other side of the world (or so we believed).

But my favorite memory of spring when I was a child had nothing to do with pig boots, puddles, crayfish, or mud. It came each year in a cardboard crate, for which I waited—with all the patience a kid could muster—for my grandmother to bring home. 

The contents meant business to my grandmother, but she knew how much it meant for the “littles” in her life to raise the lid.

And when we did . . . .  Well, there was nothing that smacked of spring like a sea of warm, yellow, soft-smelling, and noisy baby chicks.