Absorbed in my internal monologue, I think about coincidences. It doesn’t matter if you give meaning to the interconnectedness of multiple experiences or if you accept them as happenstance, serendipity make for fascinating for mental masturbation.

Months ago, I looked up the word, fecund. It was in a biography I tried and failed to finish. After learning the definition, I began to notice the word more. First, in a feminist book from 1949. Later, I read it again in a book about the impact of the alphabet on woman’s equality, and most recently spoken, by Julianne Moore in the movie, The Kids Are Alright.

If you believe everything contains meaning, then you might believe this is the year I was meant to give thought to fertility. But, if you are like me, you are scratching your head, wondering how you managed to study the Venus of Willendorf in art history, without noticing the word, fecund?

When school started this year, the ice cream truck began making regular rounds through the neighborhood, not exactly an existential crisis… but, here I am thinking about the ice cream truck and it has nothing to do with my unexplainable worship of dairy products, or that really catchy music playing that makes you want to slit your wrists….no it’s definitely Julia Sweeney’s book.

In the book, she tells an anecdote about her brother, Mike, who buys an ice cream truck. She speaks with poignancy, love and tenderness as only a sibling who shared a bathroom with you for fifteen years can. Obviously, I don’t know Mike or Julia Sweeney, for that matter, but when I hear the ice-cream truck I think about him for a moment, and how his sibling loved him enough to share his memory with others.

It doesn’t strike me as kismet, but I like that dissimilar things aren’t always as far apart as they seem.

How is it that utterly destroying something can be more gratifying than building it up?

I tore out wall board in the basement. It was old, stained, and holly. It will be replaced with bead-board paneling. There was a physicality to the act of smashing and prying that released tension in a way construction does not. It wasn’t violent so much as controlled disassembly…but the satisfaction was elating in a way that completing a drawing is not.

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There are two boxes on the floor of the kitchen and our cats have laid claim. There is nothing special about them, except for a dime bag of catnip in each, yet the cats like to lay side by side and stare at me as I cook. As if on cue, each cat has chosen the appropriately sized container for a bed.

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You know you’ve assimilated into a community once you find yourself walking around downtown muttering, “fucking tourists” under your breath.

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In southern states, it isn’t unusual to be asked “Where are you from?”. One way of interpreting the statement is an effort of politely implying you aren’t native to the area. Other interpretations are, “where were you born?” and “where do you live?”. Admittedly, the dangling preposition hacks me, but that isn’t the point.

Now that I’ve been an expatriate of my birthplace for over seventeen years, my answer is no longer the town where I spent my childhood. If the question is prefaced, “where are you from, originally?” then my answer is my birthplace. Now when prompted with the “where are you from?” question, I give the answer of the community I currently live in, because this is my home.

There is brutal honesty, truthfulness, lying, lying by omission, and lying to preserve feelings. In spite of the plethora of biblical guidance available, the best tact is hardly black and white. Some lies are based on self-preservation while others are compassionate. I’m not sure how much truth the human condition is prepared to endure.

For my mother’s birthday, I thought it appropriate to share with her something meaningful she gave me in my formative years that truly changed my life and helped shaped the person I am today….for better or worse.

I told her the best gift she gave me was encouraging me to see a different side of the world and study abroad. I’m not talking about major culture shock, I did visit an English speaking country. I knew the world was a larger place than the region where I was raised, and I knew I wanted to see the world beyond the state where I lived, but I don’t think I would have been quit so determined to leave if I had not experienced another country with all five senses.

I thanked her for expanding my world, but I neglected to mention that she also provided an exit from the world that confined me, the world that alienated me, ironically, the only world she has ever known. All unmentioned in the interest of being respectful of her feelings and her generosity.

Later I was listening as a parent complained about her adult daughter not being available for a visit. The daughter is working on her Physical Therapy credentials several states away. She’s an intelligent young woman who has tapped into her independence and begun building a place for herself in the world, as twenty-five-year-olds are known to do. She is fulfilling the desires for success with the skill set instilled in her by her parents, yet they feign abandonment because they have succeeded in raising a self-reliant, bright young woman who will probably go many places, except back home to settle down.

The shift from winter to spring seems eternal, until it doesn’t. Waiting out the schizophrenic temperature changes, thirty degrees in the a.m. hours, sixty by noon, until, almost overnight, the trees leaf out and flowering plants shed early blooms. It’s a season of hope, emerging from the otherwise dark and barren winter.

I enjoy spring, but she comes with baggage. It is a season intolerant of my procrastination and languid reading sessions of winter. Longer days shame me into spending seemingly endless hours with landscaping tools, weeding, staining, repairing the cracks and peeling paint from a season of neglect. Gone are the days of careless laying about, and surfing the internet with no sense of purpose.

I enjoy being outdoors and I know seasonal tasks are good for me. At least until the humidity matches the air temperature, that can’t possibly be good for me my attitude. There are lessons in nurturing from this seasonal shift, exercises that improve my patience with relationships, if I allow myself to learn from them.

The irony, that ever-present, driving force which motivates me to laugh and not take myself too seriously, is my neighbors believe there is a green thumb and a passion for plants motivating me, actually us, to tend to the yard. The reality is, the process is largely driven by my feeling of overwhelming responsibility to maintain living things left in my care, and my partner’s appreciation of pretty things.