Sunday Morning in the Backyard – Early Spring

For the last two weekends I have dragged out the water hose and the big blue bucket full of cleaner soaps high density drying clothes shining rags, to clean the car. It is spring. A pine tree in the rear of the house gathered all the pollen in the area and slowly deposited it all on the roof of the Trail Blazer rendering its charming light reddish brown a yellow and sticky hue. Earlier in the morning so much of the fecund stuff was blowing off the pine needles that at first I thought I was witnessing a smoldering forest fire.

So I wet and I rub and I dry and I sparkle. Each of the two weeks it has taken less than an hour to deposit, out of a clear blue and sunny sky, a rain storm laden with tubs of water on the vehicle that I have just made pristine.  Life can be a cartoon. I watch from the rear picture window drenching rain blowing almost horizontally. Smile at the Saturday Funny.

Baseball usually catches me for a month or two early in the season and I dream of the home run king that I was sure I was going to be when I was a kid playing in a stubbled field just a short bike ride down Maple Street and up into the housing plan. We had as many on the team as there were kids that showed up. Sometimes the outfield positions would be doubled. On occasion there would be another roving shortstop and redundant second baseman, but I alone always played first base. Not because I was a lefty, but because I was the only one with a first baseman’s mitt. I wasn’t bad and I could hit the ball a ton.

When it finally came time to join a little league team I was sorely disappointed. All the fun was gone and the game became serious. When we played in our rough field, everyone played, regardless of age or ability. When we competed it was against the group at the far end of the field who had an identical ethos. The organization was more than democratic and it worked just fine. Score, Who cared about score for more than a minute. It was exhilarating. It was real life. Adult supervision and "organized" little league brought the fantasy of limitation, the fantasy of real life. It is happily a lesson that I have never forgotten.

I never made a little league team. I quit after one try out.

Spring is that season for rebirth and I take it with some seriousness and I crack out of my egg. It is more important as I grow older. More miraculous.

I am sitting presently on the side porch and writing in the chill of the morning as church going cars whine up the hill. I have on a corduroy jacket and I can feel the wind cool my hands above the keyboard, the sun is making the laptop screen dim. Life ain’t so bad.