Life These Days: Spring

We are wrapping up the winter! At long last! The melting snow is revealing all sorts of treasures, mired in the mud. LIke the rusted beer cans and popsicle sticks and spongy pre-calculus textbook, on the ground, here are some of my treasures from this last little bit, the recent sun drying us all out.

It has been a busy season for us, with the new puppy, with different activities and concerts and play dates and events at the shop. Life and her riches! Give me all of it! Even as I try not to overdose on all these gifts, as I try not to be a terrible mother, as I try to respond to text messages before something else forces my hand and my lack of response comes back to bite me, much like my own puppy whom I love so much and who keeps at my ankles like I’m a cattle and not the giver of love and treats and also the person who is going to put him in his crate for a time-out. Even as I manage an impressive combination of comma splices and sentence fragments, a beautiful melange of grammatical errors that I never educated myself out of, even with a college education in literature that has been put to no use at all in my life.

In any case: a gift, this entire season. We always worry about business in January and February and maybe even into March. The slowing down of things is a slowly sharpening edge day after day, week after week. Jon likes to drive himself crazy by looking at the numbers, and I prefer to bury myself in blankets, and possibly put my head under them.

But mugobunni came into our shop for a pop-up, we’ve had classes and events, people have been wandering in and out through our doors looking pens, looking for a bathroom, looking for a friendly face in the storm of the world. Doors are still open, and along with spring, light is coming from everywhere.

We continue on, with all of the trudging through music lessons, family movie nights, high-intensity rounds of Overcooked, which is this video game where little animal characters work as a team to cook nonsense dishes and earn money and stars, half the members of this family aggressively directing the cooking operations, and the other half wanting to quit either the game or the family or both. A metaphor for life.

The children have been having a tough time with their mama taking care of her new baby. Haha! Not enough resources to spread around, everyone wondering what it would be like to be an only child, including the cats. Every time I see a family with an only child, I wonder about how much love and attention and time they get from their parents. There are pros and cons of each, I know, but one can’t help but wonder. I mean, I should probably resist wondering because it’s driving me towards my existential crisis, but such is life. The decisions we make and the unfolding of the journey we’re on. Who knows where we’re going.