Jury duty summons; I’m assured by phone that I must make a showing at Henrietta Town Court at 6pm. I show up 30 minutes early with all my required paperwork and manage almost immediately to trip over a police officer strapping a large gun while accompanying a girl in handcuffs.

I’m met at the door with a blank stare by a rather fierce looking court clerk who asks quite unwillingly if she can help me. ‘Doubtful’ I think to myself but refrain from saying so. I obligingly indicate my willingness to travel through the metal scanner but am informed I need to go around it. Upon doing so, I discover a clerk in the back who informs me that nothing is happening tonight but if I fill out my paperwork I can leave it with her and I will get credit. I hope she means cash, but I refrain from saying so. I hand in my paperwork and leave quietly.

I am still unsure as to what happened to the girl in handcuffs…

A little music, a little work, a bit of a softening shift in my mind…and I return to what was ‘then’…what used to be ‘now’. Jim Croce sings and I’m intently attached to the phrase ‘runnin shine out of Alabam…’

How might those words be explained to any friend of mine whose first language is not English? Doesn’t matter today. Not to me.

I’m resting in the ‘then’. A girl with long pigtails and pine tree sap in her hair…a long ago world in which there is no virus, the creak of the yellow bus sounds by the open window…lost faces…only dusty summer roads lie ahead…the late evening twang of tired crickets and the promise of the long July trek to Dakota territory…

‘Hey! Hey…he’s got ADHD…that kid’s got ADHD!’ I turned around in the spring wind and looked at the little girl. She was pointing at a little boy who was running in wild circles while the rest of the children bent over together, picking dandelions and spring weeds. No one was watching him except the other little girl who pointed at him and waved in my direction. I said, ‘Well, I have ABCD’ and she laughed and laughed. Then she asked, ‘Hey, wait. What does that mean?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. You tell me’. She thought for a minute. ‘Maybe it’s smart’. ‘Yup…maybe’ I responded with a shrug. She laughed and laughed and handed me a dandelion.

‘Thank you’ I said. ‘Look, look…’ She pointed to her front tooth. I bent over to look closely. There was some sort of a bump on the edge of her gums. ‘Fascinating!’ I smiled at her. I walked away in the sunny wind and she returned to the field of dandelions and other girls. The little boy kept spinning…

We stand at the edge of my Father’s grave this morning. The hill wound up and around and I am slightly confused by the grass laden trajectory. The place appears brilliantly different from burial day when we stood by the open pit, clothing pierced by snow, frozen with shards of fine ice and whipping wind.

I remembered the absurdity of ballet slippers in the January snow as if I could defy all nature. It was determined. Defiant. ‘I will wear delicate slippers at the edge of a grave and I will not be cold’. And I breathed and time was gone and then we ran into Easter, the holiest day of the year. It is 75 degrees at the edge of the grave and I kick lightly at dirt…with my ballet slippers. ‘In the twinkling of an eye we shall all be changed’.

The tumbled rocks need to be raked over and fresh grass planted and the tombstone placed. We saw and we went on, back down the hill and the dusty road, because Easter dinner is waiting and there are rum cakes and mustard honey ham and spiced potatoes and fellowship.

Because I know this grave at the top of the hill is so very temporary, I kick at the dirt with confidence and I shall no longer wear these ballet slippers this Easter eve…

I wanted to sit. To read. To observe. Eli! Suddenly wanting to dig up the front of the lawn. Purchasing ten more hedges. Purchasing two dwarf arborvitae. Purchasing ten bags of soil and even more mulch. All at once. Suddenly!

I wanted to sit.

So…that’s all been done…and a neighborhood boy hired to water the trees at a later date when we’re on vacation. The lesson is this: When Eli yells…’Hey! Come down here a minute. I want to show you something’…I will always end up driving a car filled with a forest and dealing with a cashier named Dominic who rings my receipt incorrectly.

I’m staying upstairs.

White tree blossoms against a blue sky…cotton balls in a blue sea…vanilla ice cream and blueberries…blue glass plates and cups of cold, white milk…white glue and blue crayons…and at the end of the afternoon we welcome in a rush of grey graupel.

Graupel. It’s the unfamiliar wintry precipitation; that lovely and strange cross-over between seasons cold stuff sifting down from the sky; winnowing earthward as if we were all dwelling on top of a very large doughnut. It could be precipitation. It might be powdered sugar. Soft hail, hominy snow; forming when super cooled water droplets collect and freeze on top of falling snowflakes; creating the lovely sort of strange late April meteorological happenstance which surprises us all and often leads to lengthy and refreshing napping.

I was irritated. I noticed the clunky rocks which still needed to be cleared out, lying around in my freshly graded yard. There were un-swept crumbs on my kitchen floor and they bothered me. Not all the dishes sparkled. I sighed at the sight of unwieldy white snowflakes drifting down over clean curbs and black lampposts. It was too, too much. And I noticed rust on the door of my Jeep, that faithful servant of a quarter million miles and I had to go to my job and I had things to do and days in which to do them.

And then the radio was turned on and there was a sixteen year old boy and his mother for whom he had struggled to buy passage from Africa to Europe…fleeing a murderous people and they were thrown off a boat and they drowned.

I my mind I see them survive. I wish them survival. With all my heart I envision them walking away from the turbulent and frightening waters. But I know that we have all lost dreadfully now…and I will walk out to my yard soon and stoop over and pick up dirty stones and thrown them in a box. And I will be silent…

It was that old adage which caught her up on that rainy afternoon. ‘A fool and his money is soon parted’. One could just as easily make the claim that ‘A fool and her money is soon parted’…or on the way to being parted. And so it was, she mused. She picked up her pen and looked over the ledger one more time. It was a poignant, no, rather a lovely example of the human condition.

She stretched a bit and yawned. Speaking to the numbers lined up under the ‘Amazon Prime’ column she remarked to no one in particular, ‘We are all in various stages of foolishness, it would seem’…

The swift reversal of expectations; grey winds with rain smatterings clash around the edge of the house while the porch chimes rage in metal fury. It’s April! It’s April! They are upset. They try flying separate of each other but the gales force them together into a tangled mess. Their pipes, smashed into and up against each other, hang limply in a confused and matted clump. I consider them; helpless children. They will require a ladder, stretching and reaching on my part, and a lengthy time on the couch unwinding each black string, silver pipe and wooden weight. Not today.

I think about strawberries and a croissant; a medium coffee…lighter breakfast fare as it is April, after all. It’s April! I hear the roar of the wind, watch the massacre of rain all over the windows. The birds fly slightly sideways in the air. They are surprised.

Breakfast re-group…hot buttered garlic toast, dark chocolate coffee, the kind which places a wild ‘ping’ in one’s head and a lurch in one’s chest. Add thick cream. Fruit and sunshine can wait. I’m back in the throes of autumn on this April day; amber and butter and lux and gold; cheese and bisque and the heavier spoons…

At the corner of Grape Street and crumbling houses; a community held together by the vigorous street play of children and the two red towels hanging from a chipped back window, I see two of the largest horses I have ever seen. They clip clop with regalia and precision, ridden by two police officers; ram rod straight…seated on the backs of these monster beasts…meandering quietly down the sidewalk. I ponder their size as I drive by.

When I was a very young child, we had a neighbor, an energetic chatty woman who always wore a work dress with an apron. She fixed her hair, combed tightly and held together in a bun with black bobby pins. In warm weather she washed her long locks and sat out in the backyard on the grass combing them dry. Her hair touched the ground as she sat stiffly straight on her blanket, combing, combing as the sun dried. We watched from the window, enthralled.

One day she let us in her home for milk and cookies and showed us a picture of her father. Strong, handsome and wiry…the photo was in sepia tones…melting into rivers of pink and faded orange…as if life were sweet and easy on that farm a long time ago. ‘He died when I was about your age’ she said suddenly. We looked at her. It was not polite to ask. We knew that. ‘How did he die?’ It came out before we stopped ourselves. She spoke clearly. ‘He was kicked in the stomach by a horse. That took him’. We looked at her. That couldn’t be right. ‘What?’ we asked. ‘He was kicked in the stomach by a horse’. She sighed and placed the frame back on the shelf.

Along the length of Jay Street, I’ve passed the police officers and horses. I see a crumbled woman wearing a jacket, a mask and holding a cigarette…seated on top of a large indented and crushed traffic cone which lies on the edge of the sidewalk. She’s tipped slightly sideways…looking backwards…watching the horses approaching. Their tails flare and ripple slightly in the breeze…