The spring usually brings me a surge of energy and this year I am more than grateful. It has been such an awful winter what with the cold and the rain here in Seattle, the darkness of the season, our precarious political situation and probably more than anything, the death of my kittens. After months of trudging through the dark, I feel restless and ambitious.

I was in the garden seven days in a row. After the second day, I was in a semi-permanent condition of being able to hold different positions: standing, sitting, kneeling etc. but the getting to and from those positions was enough to make me scream, certainly enough to make me curse.

I’ve been thinking about travel.

I’ve been thinking about the next 25 years of life. The same day the kittens died, the roof leaked. These two events converged into my considering the certainty of my own death and where I wanted to be living when that happened.

May I free associate to an exciting conversation I had with the caretaker of the cemetery behind me? Beyond a disreputable old common fence in my back yard is the cemetery yard and garage, which houses mowers, gravediggers and old headstones. My cats crawl under the fence and jump onto a stack of slabs; from there they jump to the roof where they like to hang out during warm summer evenings. I asked Philip at the cemetery office if they were doing anything with those headstones?

“I would love to get rid of them. And what you see is only the tip of the ice berg.”

By the time we finished discussing it, Philip had decided this would be a good time to replace the fence. When they took the old one down, they could slide all the headstones over onto my property. I, well not, I personally, but someone can bust them into smaller pieces and I’ll have flagstones for all the paths I want all over my yard. Stay tuned.

Garden Paths Phase 2
(Phase one was smothering them in cardboard all winter. Hideous.)

Back to my restlessness. There not being any immediate plans to pack for a trip, re-roof or sell the house, and having used up my back’s allotted hour per day in the garden but still wanting something new to do, I went to Target. Two people, independently of each other, have told me recently about something available at Target. I wandered around Target for 45 minutes, trying to think why I was there, before I remembered the store they had referenced was T.J. Max. I related this to Nancy when we walked around Green Lake.

“You wanted to do something new so you went to Target?”

Put like that it sounds pathetic. I’m not saying it wasn’t. There’s more:

I took some forms to a bank to be notarized. I haven’t been in a bank in fifteen years. It was odd. I remember being in banks with desks buzzing, tellers busy, the line five deep and the complimentary coffee fragrance making me start to percolate when I opened the door. I counted ten empty desks in the bank the other day. One teller was on the phone with someone named Bernard who sounded like he needed reassurances beyond what the teller could give him about an account that wasn’t at that bank. She mouthed apologies to me. The other employee was helping an elderly woman with her safety deposit box. Of course, I thought, the only people who go into banks anymore are the elderly.

Once the elderly woman got settled in her private room with her box, the second employee (Bernard was still gamely on the phone with the first) asked if she could help. I told her what I needed.

“Oh, that’ll be Dustin and he’s around here somewhere. I just saw him.” She shot out of the room texting and scouting all at once. Then she shot back in. “Do you mind waiting? He should be back any second.”

“I’ll just get my book out of the car,” I said.

A book. That locates me with Bernard who has the wrong bank and the elderly woman who was probably there to retrieve a library card from her safety deposit box. I sat down and read until a second elderly woman arrived with the help of a cane at the same time as the recalcitrant Dustin. The full trio of bank employees greeted her as though she were their grandmother. They asked about her arthritis and hugged her.

And there I was. I was uncharacteristically patient because I was kind of in awe that a trip down memory lane (and I want to travel!) was to be had right off the street like that. There was something soothing about the whole experience.

I’ve seen a lot of springs in my life. Spring is still a miracle.