The faces of my Irish family come a'callin

My brother Jay and I grew up a country field away and yet “here” was a constant destination, where my grandparents Florence and Joe Drennan lived on the farm.

We slept here at their house most Friday nights, waking up early Saturday mornings to help Grandpa with farm chores. My grandma, meanwhile, cooked and baked the best of everything and not for lack of trying have I duplicated any of those recipes in my kitchen.

My grandfather stood every morning at the kitchen sink, looking into a small mirror sitting on the window ledge where he’d comb what hair he had left with a oval-shaped, soft-bristled brush and then adjust the silver arm bands on his work shirt before he headed outside to the chores in the barn. He took such pride in the preparation before a day’s work.

Grandpa Drennan had a mighty soul stocked with discipline and work ethics that measured hands above any draft horse of his day.

And when I walk with intent today across the yard from the farmhouse to the barn, I remember watching Grandpa do the same thing, as if on a mission.

Yep, we are definitely related.

Family mattered at all turns and we were a part of everything—planting potatoes in the spring or walking on the cattle drive, harvesting hay bales in late summer, and cleaning cow poop out of the gutters in the barn. Thank Heaven for all of it.

Grandpa and Grandma Drennan died in 1996 and 2006 respectively and this old farm has changed a lot in the seven years since I purchased it. There are more trees planted and less farm machinery parts lying around and the barn, old and shoddy as it is on the outside, has had its face lifted on the inside. 

I wonder what Grandpa would have done if he’d have walked into the barn last week before the family reunion and caught me dusting and vacuuming the place as foot stomping tunes belted out of two big stereo speakers hanging from the ceiling.

I think he’d smile at my disciplined nature and nod in understanding of the passion and pride that was bouncing around in there. I miss you.

I worked hard on a summer’s mission to ready this old homestead for the “Drennan Reunion” and for the spirited bunch of more than 80 relatives who hadn’t partied here together in two years and who would move in with their camper trailers and tents to take up the cause.

They came, they partied, they made memories.

“We put our glass to the sky and lift up

And live tonight 'cause you can't take it with ‘ya

So raise a pint for the people that aren't with us

And live tonight 'cause you can't take it with ‘ya.” 

I stood in a sea of Drennan descendants in my neck of the woods on Saturday afternoon during a scavenger hunt and soaked up laughter and camaraderie that funneled through all of us.

I thought to myself, “We’re all here where we belong.”

When it got dark on Saturday night, we lit and released 20 flying lanterns that pierced the sky above Frog Creek. There was a moment of silence that spoke volumes as we all watched the lights rise into the heavens.

Joe,

James, Jack, and Harry, Margaret, Pat, Janet, and Tillie we remember you.

We belong. We are Drennan.

“May the road rise to meet you. May the wind be always at your back. May the suns shine warm upon your face, and the rain fall soft upon your fields, and until we meet again, May God hold you in the palm of his hand.”

The wild things in life make a story

It’s late Sunday morning and a gentle rain is falling. I am on the edge of lamenting such precipitation because I could be outside cutting the grass instead of sitting here typing. But then again, as I see it, all things happen for a reason.

At least the rain gives me a break from hauling my watering can uphill from the creek to the garden and flowerbeds. Every new summer I mutter about the muscle work and swear the next time around I will have a water pump. That would-be oath has been on my lips each year since I moved here seven summers ago. I guess the pump hasn’t yet reached the top of list.

However, raccoons or some such varmint have made it.

 

“Little Miss” spent many hours of back and biceps ache digging an extended garden this spring.

I went to the local nursery and purchased vegetable plants including broccoli and green peppers, and luscious strawberries. I could taste the fruits of my labor already.

I think my future bounty was in the ground two days, maybe three, when something promptly ate all the leaves off everything, leaving behind “Charlie Brown” bare twigs of pathetic nothings.

I, the master of the word, was speechless. Yes, I should have known better. I should have wired the garden to the fuse panel.

After all I live in the country where the deer and raccoon play—and  they play more now that I don’t have a dog posse roaming the grounds for intruders.

Sadly my two cats are not replacements. The best they give me is a long, flat stare when I ask them to fetch the mouse that just ran by me in the porch.

Strangely there was little evidence of hoof or paw marks in the dirt of the garden. Either it was a very tall deer with a long neck or a raccoon tied to a tether that zip-lined from the barn roof and nibbled off the tops of my precious plants.

Being the imaginative woman that I am, I suspected the latter—a notion that grew rapidly when I spotted a big, fat, masked thief sauntering along the edge of the garden at dusk earlier this week.

I grabbed a golf club and marched over there to show the rodent what a hole in one looked like but he got wind of me and made like a bandit. 

Suddenly I had visions of raccoons living in the hayloft, dancing around up there, and pooping out parasites all over my would-be dance hall floor.

I hailed for reinforcements from Daughter #3 and headed to the barn to turn on the stereo and smoke the little buggers out as “Bat Out of Hell” by Meatloaf vibrated the framework.  

We must have looked like downright hillbillies marching up the staircase to the hayloft bearing pitchforks and steel rakes and strutting our stuff as the song, “Sharp Dressed Man” by ZZ Top barreled out of the speakers that afternoon. All we found was pigeon and sparrow doo-doo.

“Be afraid! Be very afraid!” I shouted anyway—and then I went out and replanted my garden.

I reckon I’m going to have a bumper crop. It’s always a possibility.

Raised in hope, the best gift of all

Writing from the heart is tricky business. 

I found that out in a sheepish—albeit comical way—when, once upon a column, I put it all “out there” and wrote about issues with my Greek figure (and included in my column how much I weighed) and my subsequent choices to begin to lead a healthier lifestyle.

An avid reader of said “baring” then found me sitting at a local hamburger joint stuffing in a cheeseburger and called me on it right there in the restaurant from across the room.

I wanted to throw down one of those black magic circles from the “Looney Tunes” cartoons, jump in and disappear to some faraway city as one of the anonymous populace. 

I’ve been writing my column since 2004 and I think I’ve covered just about every personal topic known to “readerkind.” Yet, I still find that the delicate river that runs through us all, and its muddy layers of our thick-skinned ways, never really reaches an end in discussion.

“There’s always something,” as my late grandmother Florence Drennan used to say (although she usually was talking about the one more thing to do around the farm that she hadn’t planned on.)

This writing space is good medicine and I am very lucky to have it, especially when I use the opportunity to write from my heart and today is just another perfect opportunity to take to the river once more.

Best selling author Neil Gaiman penned good advice. 

“Write. Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down. Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.”

I love and adore my father, Bruce. He is 87 years old and when I get to thinking about the depth of human being he is, I can only hope to be as good and kind and wise in all my days as he is in his.

He remains the cornerstone of his daughter’s life.

He raised me in hope and, in fact, both of my parents did.

It was my father’s most common reply to my childhood questions that instilled in me an optimistic self-power that to this day defends me in difficult circumstances and fuels my goals for purposeful happiness.

“It’s always a possibility,” my dad used to say—and still does if you ask him the right question.

My dad is my mentor and my friend, my ranch helper and my favorite historian with an encyclopedia of knowledge and stories about his career and his life that one day will fill the pages of a book.

It’s an incredible gift to have him here in this life with me.

“Fathers and daughters have a romance that goes on for the rest of their lives, destined to ripen and age as they dance through the days of their husbands and wives. Up near the surface their love is distinct,

like a garden surveyed in the sun, in which seed time and full bloom are credibly linked by a consciousness shared and hard won. 

Deep down below, where the world is a dream, and the dream is a world of its own, all manner of memories the moments redeem in a place where one's never alone.” – Nicholas Gordon

Right from my heart I write to you, my dad. I love you. Happy Father’s Day.

The progressive expansion of happiness

It’s nearly 9:30 p.m. and I’m looking out my front window at the still and quiet of the evening and the closing off of daylight as the orange sun slides beneath the horizon.

Once again, and this time through very sad events in the lives of others I am reminded that Joan Didion continues to be right. “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant.”

I also am reminded through these very sad events in the lives of others, that I can easily be sideswiped by my own past shadows that (to paraphrase Mark Nepo) apparently still wait in behind and are quite willing to be background to my joy.

I guess it means I’m still ever edging outwards in healing from my own storm damage, when life as I knew it ended and a different one began.

Of late I’ve been wandering into territory that fellow freelancer Wendi Stewart wrote about a few weeks in her column, “Wendi with an ‘eye.’”

She said, “that’s what writers do; we write about that which puzzles us in the hopes some understanding will surface and we can get our minds around the subject that is poking at us from the inside.”

I am puzzled by many things, some worth piecing together and some, not so much. I spend a lot of time thinking about what I think about, strange as that may sound.

I’d like to think I’d make a good life coach; someone who through her experiences in leading an imperfectly perfect life could help another human being to grow into their own light. A “perspective changer.” Time will tell.

I had a question recently posed to me. “What’s the purpose of your life, Beth?”

And much to my surprise I couldn’t answer it promptly and that bugged me—a lot.

For the rest of that day I felt stymied in some internal way, as if the fact that I couldn’t answer the question meant I didn’t know what I wanted or what I was supposed to be doing with my life.

I put great expectations on myself to come up something. A few days passed before it dawned on me that I had known all along what my purpose was. I had written about it many times in one way or another and yet had lost my way somewhere from there to here.

Purpose is sacred to each of us—this I know for sure—and I respect yours, whatever it may be.

But before I shine a refresher on mine, I want to go back to the beginning of this column and the shadows that linger as the background to joy.

Nepo writes “That we insist on keeping old wounds alive, is our curse.” He’s right. It’s what we focus on that manifests itself.

“When I focus on the rake of experience and how its fingers dug into me and the many feet that have walked over me, there is no end to the life of my pain. But when I focus on the soil of heart and how it has been turned over, there is no end to the mix of feelings that defy my want to name them. Tragedy stays alive by feeling what’s been done to us. Peace comes alive by living with the result.”

What is the purpose of my life? My purpose is to be happy. I deserve to be happy. We all do.

Somehow, for a little while, I forgot about that.

The happiness balance is tedious, constant work. Sometimes I do it well, sometimes I do appallingly, but I believe in my choice and I dwell in its possibilities.

A day for the dog that cleaned house

I’ve made good on the “Jumpstart to Summer” theme. At this moment, I am more tired than the most tired person on the planet, but I feel like a million bucks.

I sucked the marrow out of a three-day weekend and every used-up muscle and aching joint is a reminder that I love living a whole life (even if my million bucks feels run over by a truck.)

I had my first experience this weekend in being of assistance in the launch of a certain sailboat; now back to the lake for the season, including raising of the mast. I can add “Little Miss Mast Helper” to my list of essential skills.

I also made good on a couple of big chores I had on my list here in my neck of the woods, including digging a new 12 sq. ft. addition to my garden, and cleaning up yet another pile of old junk iron, cast off from yesteryear when this place was a working farm.

There isn’t enough room in the back of a half ton for what I dug out from alongside the barn during this latest and dare I say—final—mission to neaten up this farmyard so that it reflects my chi. It’s taken me nearly seven years to get to this point and yet something tells me the process is likely to continue.

I love my grandparents, however I am now convinced there may be hoarding DNA in my gene pool. (Chances are good though that I rewired the inherency with my land-clearing drive.)

I’ve discovered that digging a garden is a great way to solve the problems of the world, lash out at personal beefs, and fold up head laundry that has been strewn about in discarded, unorganized piles.

During the hours it took me to kick in the shovel, remove the sod, and haul it away, I dealt with the ridiculous price of gasoline, Monsanto’s seed monopoly, Toronto’s mayoral crisis, and last but not least hashed out a plan to repair the road to town, which has slumped into a below-grade donkey trail out here.

In a heightened moment of self-empowered problem-solving, I marched across the yard from the garden to the tool shed to find a pitchfork and upon stepping into the building came face to face with a fat, buck-toothed, ugly groundhog. 

Both alphas were bug-eyed for a moment, surprised and unsure of who was more dangerous. The groundhog’s bullish nature led to me to it too had just finished digging a hole somewhere and had become incensed by the unfixed problems of the world and was in the shed looking for the same pitchfork.

We glared at each other for a moment and then both of us made a beeline for the back corner of the shed where the pitchfork stood. I shouted, “This is my shed, get out!” The groundhog fired back a chortle of teeth-gnashing sounds somewhere around my feet as it scurried under the shelving and out of sight.

I grabbed the pitchfork and did a 180-degree turnabout, expecting to meet the rodent of my worst nightmare standing on its hind legs and holding the “Sawzall.” Instead the loser made a fast dash for the door and was gone in a flash of fuzzy tail.

I now suspect I have an unwelcome guest living under the tool shed. I wish you were here “Dot.”  I need you for that dog versus varmint “Jumpstart to Summer” sideshow.

Shaking my head at the family circus

 “SMH.” 

For those of you who have not yet been sucked into the vortex of cell phone texting and Internet acronyms, the three consonants stand for “Shake My Head.”

The letters also represent an Australian newspaper known as the Sunday Morning Herald, and likely also are a short form for other places or things in the world.

In my neck of the woods SMH is plain and simple. Shake my head. A lot. Sometimes SMH is accompanied by the closing of eyes, the gnashing of teeth, a sigh, a groan, a guffaw, or an expletive uttered both above and below the decibels detected by the human ear, a stomping of feet, and/or a throwing up of hands and arms in a gesture of surrender to the moment at hand.

I’m upgrading from a double to a queen-size bed and decided to mess with my bedroom chi in light of the change. 

I have wasted more time standing in the middle of the room contemplating redesign of the overcrowded space than I care to admit. Given that I only have 120 sq ft to work with, there are only so many options at my disposal. Leave it to me, though, to spend innumerable hours of my spare time fine tooth contemplating every inch. SMH.

Miss “Smartie Pants,” who is home from University for the summer, has suddenly become the expert on counseling me, akin to a reality show about hoarders. “You don’t need a bigger house Mom, you need to get rid of some stuff,” she said, chuckling.

SMH. (The peanut gallery comments came from the one whose heavy suitcase required an airplane of its own to fly it here last month.)

Nonetheless I probably could downsize. Moving my stuff from one room to the other isn’t exactly working.

Every time I put something in the “donate” pile I can hear my brother’s voice of reason whispering to me, “But you might find a use for that.”

Come to think of it, I have a pile of stuff my brother bought for himself at a garage sale in 2007 still stored in my shed. SMH.

As an aside, I did clean a bit of financial house recently when I decided to cancel my term life insurance policy—you know—the one you buy when you’re 25 years old that at the time cost peanuts.

I don’t know where the time went but I do know the monthly insurance payment skyrocketed at a recent renewal term, so I canceled it.

You should have seen the look on two of my offspring’s faces when I told them there was no pot of gold after I kicked the bucket.

“Now what are we supposed to do!” one of them blurted out, as if I was going to vanish into the mystic upon my next breath. Obviously they have forgotten that I am going to live until I’m 110.

I couldn’t help but laugh (followed by SMH) at the honest panic in the response to my tell-all.

I wonder if I should also tell the kids that I’m going to take all my “stuff” with me when I go. 

After all, maybe my brother is right. I might find a use for that.

Four little peppers make a good story

Erma Bombeck said, “Never have more children than you have car windows.”

How about, “Never take more small grandchildren with you to a restaurant than you have arms.”

Recently during a mid-week lull in my calendar of events I put the question to four of my grandchildren, who range in age from 4-7, if they would like to go to the local hamburger place with Granny.

I knew the answer would be unanimous before I finished asking the question. I’d like to think their response was based solely on being with the world’s greatest Granny, but I think fries and kids’ meal toys had more to do with the quartet happily saying “Yes!”

Nonetheless I was thrilled watching them all pile into the car with such enthusiasm. There wasn’t much else I wanted in that moment except that as I got closer to the restaurant and decided I needed a body harness to keep them from exploding from the car in the parking lot like the break shot after the eight ball.

However we made it safely into the restaurant at which point there was a 360 degree shift away from what they wanted to eat and straight to the prize that came with the food. They flitted about the toy showcase like bees in search of honey and I just stood there in awe of all that energy.

A bunch of older gentlemen seated at a table nearby expressed their amusement in loud and healthy guffaws.  I’m sure I heard one guy say, “it’s like nailing J-ello to a tree.”  Uh huh. 

Another man chuckled out something that included the words, “slinky,” “monkey”, “chipmunk,” and “slingshot.” 

Uh huh, that’s my brood too.

I finally nailed down the J-ello long enough to get a food list out of each of them and headed to the counter to make an order.

With my back turned, the four sprites made a dash for the soda fountain machine. When I turned around three of the little critters were giggling and watching as the buttons they were pushing allowed soda pop to run freely from the spouts.

I lassoed them in while pondering the quote by Gene Perret. “My grandkids believe I'm the oldest thing in the world. And after two or three hours with them, I believe it, too.”

I managed to keep them seated for about 10 minutes so they could eat their supper and in the meantime I asked one of my granddaughters if she had learned any new words in school that day.

“Sphinx,” I heard her say. 

“Really?” I said, rather impressed that Egyptian history was on a five-year-old’s education plate. “Sphinx?” I repeated.

“No Granny, ‘Spanx.’

“Spanx!” I blurted out, my eyeballs huge as melons, as I became aware that I still had mine on at the end of the workday.

 “You are learning about Spanx in school?!” I said, stunned.

“No Granny, Space!” We learned about Space,” she replied in an adamant tone.

I burst out laughing when I realized she’d said the same word three times. Perhaps it’s time Granny got an audiogram.

One little pepper needed my help in the bathroom and I left the seven-year-old in charge for two minutes. I came back into the room and my five year old grandson was making the leap from one table top to the other. When he saw the dark cloud of displease forming over my head he cleared the table and did a two-foot dismount, ran and sat down like nothing had happened.

I was getting older by the second.

I wanted to feed all of them loads of chocolate and then send them home to their mothers.

Instead we drove to Pither’s Point and watched from the car as the pelicans, geese, seagulls, and ducks took baths in the cold icy lake water. 

There are no words that do justice to the high-pitched glee that tumbled out of those little children when they were all piled up at the car windows saying “Hello” to the birds of spring. 

Wonderment and joy. That’s what little children are made of.

Looking forward to seeing you, grasshopper

 Life is about to change for the summer. That is of course if we ever GET to a summer season around here, but let’s not open on that line of chronic complaining this time around.

As I said, life is about to change for the summer. The change is vibrant, challenging, stubborn, bakes a mean cheesecake, leaves her bath towel on the floor, loves cats, has been known to leave three days worth of cereal dishes in her room but does her own laundry, stays up later than a vampire, carries an interesting conversation, favors rap and most of all adores her mother.

In a week, Daughter #3 will be home from University and for the next 3 ½ months the chores of dishwasher and meal planner—and for the first time since I moved here nearly seven years ago—the job of lawn maintenance will fall to the youngest of my offspring. Woo Hoo! 

If Melody Beattie has taught me anything about letting go, it’s about giving up control of “Big John,” the most awesome lawn tractor on the planet.

Daughter #3 has been asking to cut the grass for years and I’ve been a control freak about doing it myself. I’m giving up the reins.

I texted her just now with the breaking news. I figured she would be as happy as a lark. All I got back was “Ew.” 

Go figure.

Little does Daughter #3 know—“Ew” or not—there also will be goose poop detail.

By mid-summer my farmyard is a magnet for the flock’s depository. Currently there is just one pair of geese that have staked claims in bare patches of grass near the barn as they feed up before the laying season.

Of course I didn’t help the situation any. The first time I spotted them here a week or so ago, I threw sunflower seeds all over the place to show my support for their arrival.

Stay they did. Feed them and they will come, you fool.

While I was away at work, the geese and several of their cousins wandered hither, pooping and sunning themselves in the most inconvenient place possible—at my back door. As luck would have it I didn’t notice the goosey green turds until I had walked through several of them in my work shoes.

I’m not sure if the poop was a way of saying “thank you,” sort of along the same lines as when I find the dead mouse on the same step after a cat leaves it there for me, suggestive of an oblige for free room and board.

Nonetheless I am pleased to see my feathered friends whose resilience in these unpredictable and unsavory snow days lead me to believe they know something warm and good is just around the corner.

And as far as my grasshopper is concerned, the mother in me looks forward to seeing you step off the plane with that overstuffed suitcase.

It will take a team of wild horses to keep me from running screaming across the tarmac, my arms wide open for hugs and my enthusiasm eager to tell you how much I look forward to having my dishes washed, my supper made, and the grass cut. 

But first let’s eat pizza and watch “chick flicks.”

Welcome home lovey!

Be the thing that moves you forward

“As scarce as the truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.”  How true. How very true.

This is a quote penned by Josh Billings, an American humorist who lived during the 1800’s. His real name was Henry Wheeler Shaw and in the day he was the second most famous humorist in the U.S., next to Mark Twain.

I’d never heard about Billings until last week, when a friend sent me an email with the above quote in it. I’ve thought a lot about Josh Billings since then and I’ve spent some time reading more about this man, who had a wonderful quirky sense of optimism and a wise stroke of words in his penmanship.

Right about now, as snowflakes continue to drib drab the mood of the collective, I’m up for just about any positive vibes I can get my hands on or my head wrapped around, as a warring mechanism against the doldrums of the lingering winter weather.

I was feeling so gunned down by the cold that I turned the corner and vowed with myself to spread sunshine instead of rain.

It all started when I saw a Facebook status Monday morning that read, “Allowing people to drain your energy with their chronic complaints is not kindness, it’s complicity.” How true.

If you are doing the “Spock” eyebrow thing about the word “complicity,” look it up.

Or better yet, look at controlling the things you can do something about and move away from worry about the things you have no affect over. 

I have a truckload of personal experience with co-dependency, a dysfunction I admit to in myself and recognize in others. I continue to teach myself in the language of letting go of it in my life.

Among the lessons? All the alarms go off when I find myself standing within ear shot of a chronic complainer and realize for the umpteenth time that I am a supporter of the negative “Nellys and Neds” of the world if I stick around as their audience. I want to be done with that.

Mike Dooley, a mentor for anyone seeking a positive lifestyle, believes that our thoughts become things and that we should think good ones. I’m a big fan. His daily email is the first good thought I read and absorb every day before I even get out of bed.

Dee Caffari, a British sailor, sailed by herself non-stop around the world in 2006 and 2009, and into the history books as the first woman to do that and to do it in both easterly and westerly directions.

In a radio interview Caffari talked about the greatest lessons she learned while out there, often at “Point Nemo.” (Spock eyebrow again? Look it up.)

Caffari admitted that her default setting was “to say what I don’t want to happen and what I don’t want to do.”

Sound familiar? 

She had to make a conscious effort to change to be a positive person to focus on moving away from what she didn’t want to happen and more toward what she did want to happen.

Repeat after me, girlfriend.  “There is no stronger woman than me, like a train coming down the horizon.” 

Old Man Winter, I insist you desist

“It’s like Chinese water torture—slow and relentless,” he said, sour-toned on the dragging carcass of winter.

I couldn’t have put it better myself in 500 words. But what the heck, I can try.

The weather has played me out and I don’t play out easily. I don’t give up easily either and yet soon—very soon—in fact, perhaps right this minute I’m going to recant everything I said a few weeks ago during a momentary lapse of sanity when I got all syrupy about the emergence of spring.

Little did I know that when I wrote “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all,” that those feathers would molt, revealing a scrawny, half-frozen version of hope that is looking more and more like the wide-eyed demented New Orleans’ voodoo doll that I have sitting on my writing desk.

I think I’ve performed my “Yosemite Sam” temper tantrum three times this week, with each episodic fit involving a piece of winter clothing being stomped flat under my feet before I throw it down the stairs to the basement.

I even caught myself pointing a shaking finger at my scarf and my winter boots as I scolded them like small children for even thinking I was going to wear them again. Watching judgingly was “Millie the Cat” on haunches and with a squinty-eyed expression that said “the boss has lost it.”

Frustration over the lack of spring weather has reached its cold-hearted tentacles into my music library too. Instead of the usual upbeat and peppy tunes rocking my speakers, there’s “Country Girl Kiss-off” music blasting out all manner of “tell him to hit the road and to watch his back 'cause a country girl with an attitude always gets her revenge.”  Say what?

The weather has played me out and I’ve lost all good sense.

At the gas station the other day as I pulled my debit card out of the machine at the counter after buying more chocolate, I caught myself mumbling, “I was going to start eating right today but my ‘give a damn is busted’.”

I looked up to the store clerk whose saucer-eyed open-mouthed stupor meant I’d definitely been listening to “kiss-off” music way too much.

Stupid Old Man Winter.

I’ve even gone so far as to re-share a post to my Facebook page of the image of a snowman pummeled with knives and the caption, “Die, Winter, Die!”  What have I become?! 

Old Man Winter, the word is “enough.” Look it up.

And there I was, ready to pitch a suitcase into the back seat of my car and drive south until the butter melts until I realized I don’t have any holidays until August.

In her book “More Language of Letting Go,” Melody Beattie encourages that during the month of April we learn to identify and say what we want for our lives.

I’m pretty sure she isn’t talking about simple stuff like a little bit of warmer weather—but what the heck.

I want spring to come.