Spring is always a mix of warm and cold weather in the northern part of the midwest. We get the winds from Canada coming down, mixing it up with the warm winds coming up from the Gulf, and they fight it out for a few weeks until finally the mosquito winds from Minnesota sweep across the Lake to try and drain all our blood while we camp. It's a fine midwestern tradition.
It was wonderfully warm just a few days ago, up past eighty, and then the temperature dropped like a stone back to the forties and the wind picked up and suddenly it's like winter all over again, except for the snow. The deep snow, I mean. Up north of Grand Rapids, there was some snow mixed in with the rain, and people were just shaking their heads and expressing thankfulness that they weren't down south where the floods were causing all kinds of devastation.
Our time will come, though. Seems like every year, the River overflows somewhere along the line, and the houses which are foolish enough to exist near the banks will suffer some kind of damage. The television news shows will have footage of flooded basements, mildewed drywall, dog houses floating out to sea. It's always a gamble living on the riverbank.
Mother's Day is tomorrow, and the weather is perfect for having a marvelous dinner indoors. No one is going to be having any picnics, and I feel sorry for anyone hoping to pose for some photographs in the garden. They'll be wearing thermal underwear if they do. We haven't figured out what we're doing yet. Cheryl and I went out for dinner tonight, and we picked up a roast chicken at Costco that can be used for dinner tomorrow; there's plenty of leftover spaghetti for tomorrow's lunch since the kids didn't eat it for dinner tonight (they opted for mac'n'cheese instead). So we've got all the meals covered. We hardly ever cook on Sunday anyway. Lunchtime is generally used to clean out the leftovers, and Sunday evening is less a dinner than a snacktime.
Sometimes it's hard to make Mother's Day as special as one would like. We know that she deserves some kind of reward for all the work she does, and we'd like to shower her with gifts and dinners and flowers and chocolate and all those other things. But then we allow logic and calculation to slip into our minds, and we figure out that there isn't really anything she needs apart from what she has, and we really can't afford to go out for dinner again, and the chocolate won't help our waistlines, and we generally let her pick out her own flowers because our ability to select them is inhibited by our fear of sneezing (even though the plastic ones technically don't exude pollen).
The children are not especially cognizent of events such as these; we have to remind them over and over again, and then not be surprised when they produce nothing in the way of cards or notes or homemade treasures. That's the way kids are. It's best to keep our expectations low so that we are not disappointed at their lack of sentiment, and occasionally surprised by their generosity. They'll learn. Especially those who will one day have girlfriends. Oh, yes, they will learn.
As one of my assignments this past week, I sorted through about a million digital photographs (and a few old-fashioned printed ones) to locate some significant events in the life of Mary, who will shortly be graduating elementary school. (I'm still amused by the thought of "graduating" from elementary school. Is this one of those bizarre self-esteem things which has come into vogue in recent years, or has there always been a graduation ceremony for elementary school? I certainly don't remember having one.) The task was to find one birth-year picture, one 1st-year-of-school picture, and one school-event picture. I thought I'd share with you what I found.
Big brother Adam gets to hold new sister Mary
Suddenly she's going to school.
And then she's hanging out in Detroit with her Mom.
Man, they grow up fast. Next year, she won't be able to sleep in while her siblings get up with the dawn; she'll be right in there with her sister, standing at the bus stop with the rest of the commuters. No more walking to school.
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