Saturday, May 06, 2017

Saturday

How grand it would be for all if we could just will away all our large and small aches and pains! The weekend promises beautiful weather and I want to work outside, so back pain -- be gone! Poof!

Miraculously, except for a few whispered, tiny reminders, I woke up to a more or less normal state. The back ache recognized my need to move ahead with yard work today. How good is that!

Morning walk through the garden to see what's what...



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The chickens accompany me...


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Breakfast!


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And then we have a somewhat shortened walk around the Farmers Market. Snowdrop so wanted her own flower, that I splurged.


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A brief hide and seek game...


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... and then I part ways with the young family.


And most of the remaining daylight hours I spend in the gardens of the farmette. Yes, with the cheepers following my every move. (They are convinced that there is no greater purpose to life than to unearth worms and so surely I must be in pursuit of just that.)


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In the meantime, Ed has begun the project of building a sandbox.

It took him FOREVER to come up with a design that would make use of existing resources: odd boards, plywood sheets and strips of wood that he stacks in the garage, and paint, left over from our farmhouse remodeling project. The usual Ed, piecing together something out of nothing.


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By evening, the structure is ready for a paint job: yellow with white trim. Just like the farmhouse!


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The cheepers don't get our fascination with this sandbox. They retire to a supper en plein air, underneath the fiercely blooming crab apples.


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A good day, don't you think? Yes, a good day. And so I read with a half-smile the article in the NYTimes that talks of the content on social media: the authors claim that the good, the wondrous, the perfect stuff posted on social media (FaceBook, to be precise) simply makes readers feel miserable about their own lives. As in -- why isn't my husband be perfect and why don't we ever take these fantastic Caribbean vacations?

Ocean isn't social media, but there are similarities. And the suggestion is that postings that do not present the miserable side of life make those who suffer feel more alone.

Well maybe. On the other hand, when, in the past, everything for me seemed to be unraveling,  reading stuff where people had similar tragedies and poor outcomes made me feel worse rather than vindicated.

Choice is a wonderful thing: you can hide from content that makes you cringe and you can reread anything out there that gives you a chuckle.

I can only hope that Ocean gives you that occasional chuckle. One that comes straight from the belly.

In the alternative, a gentle smile will do. It's grand to find reasons to smile. Maybe reading a post here can push you now and then toward that grin. If even one person is made better, calmer, happier by some anecdote he or she will have read here, well then, the time I spend on writing posts will be time not wasted.

Happy weekend to all!