It’s been a lengthy stretch of sporadic posting at best. I’ve excused it with “spending time with my wife” and “getting things done” which certainly sound worthy. We’ve just returned from attending her mother’s funeral. (More on that later.) A slate of urgent tasks demands my attention, as does maintaining my health, both physical and mental.

A few pieces of writing, stubs and nothing more, await more attention than I can manage right now. Today let’s just review the two-plus weeks since I posted a hawk in our front yard. Hawks continue to drop by, a vivid affirmation to our decision to rip out the front lawn and install native plants—and especially to my decision to let the leaves lie where they fall. The leaf cover has fostered those little grubs and bugs birds like eat and extends to small rodents for the hawks.

Sadly, rodents (squirrels) ripped into the blossoms of our star magnolia. This is as good as it ever looked this spring:

Perhaps the false starts to spring affected it? We had days in the 70’s and hit 80 once before cold weather set in again, complete with dustings of snow and some freezing rain. The cold became brutal for North Carolina, dropping into the teens. This delayed the magnolia’s blooming by two weeks or more. It looked like this last year, weeks earlier:

We revisited the Duling-Kurtz Country Inn in Exton, PA, Sunday evening. Sitting up by the fire that evening pleased us both. Dressing for the funeral in this room made things marginally better than performing the same in a generic Hilton or Marriott property.

We’re on the eve of a personal holiday, Opening Day of Baseball. The joy baseball brings will temper the immediate sorrow of losing our last parent. This year promises many highs and lows, a challenge from start to finish. “May you live in interesting times.” Indeed.