I'd been walking past these buds for weeks now just waiting. WAITING! And now, finally, The Blooms! Years ago, after we moved onto this street, I got a few lilies at the Home Depot and had them around the house for Easter. Then they died and I couldn't bare to toss them into the garbage, so I just stuck them in the ground out front. Now, every year about this time, The Blooms!
I consider it something of a minor miracle, given that the soil under the Ditchman compound is an insoluble mixture of cement, clay, gravel, quikcrete, hardened lava, moon rock, naturally occurring metals... Who knows why some things grow in the stuff and others don't. I keep at it, though, with the petulant tenacity that humans are prone to. Our Father, who art in Heaven, shakes his head. When are they just gonna let it go? I'm still waiting on some of those seeds to pop up in the garden boxes. That was months ago.
Mrs. Ditchman is on the clock this week. Man, is she ever. One Home Show is tough enough, but two back to back and you get moments like this:
Mommy: Bye, bye. Okay, give Mommy a kiss.
Baby: And a hug.
Mommy: And a hug, too!
Baby: And a high five.
Mommy: And a high five. Okay, I have to go to work.
Baby: I don't like work.
That's funny, she doesn't say things like that when I go to work. Oh well. It'll swing around the other way by the end of the week. Why, just this morning Mrs. Ditchman went in to help her out of bed and the kid said: No. I want Daddy.
How nice, but Daddy was sleeping.
Not that it mattered. I'm not even sure where to start today. I've got a few hours to myself and a hundred unanswered emails, so there goes the morning. The heat wave we experienced these past few days has left a dry, burnt sheen on the Ditchman landscape, and I suppose I should tend to that before it combusts. I like these mid-April heat waves, though! Better than the June gloom that often comes early and leaves mid-July. We slept with all the windows open the other night and awoke yesterday with fresh air in the house, birds chirping outside. It was like we were camping!
We like to camp on the lake in the middle of summer when it's nice and scorching, with the water temp around 82 degrees. Air temp is in the 90s when the sun hits the horizon, and you are out of your tent to see the orange glow on the cliffs, and their reflection in the vast, still water. Yesterday I awoke to someone firing up a lawn mower with a WHIRRRRRR in the suburban distance, and in my dreamland I heard it as that first bass boat making its way across the glassy lake, heading for fertile fishing grounds at first light.
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