‘Tomorrow is spring? Tomorrow is spring’ he answers his own question. ‘Yes’ I nod. ‘End of the road, in theory’. All because the beaver didn’t see his tail’. Silence. ‘Or the chipmunk’.

I add ‘The groundhog didn’t see his shadow’. He nods. ‘Yes. We lucked out this year’.

We enter the restaurant and he begins a friendly banter with the waiter. They chatter happily in Spanish. ‘I’m going to ask him where he’s from when he comes back to our table. I’m pretty good at guessing the sounds’. I ask him, ‘Where do you think he is from?’

‘The Dominican Republic’ he answers. ‘Really? The Dominican Republic?’ ‘Yes’ he nods vigorously.

The waiter returns. They start to talk again. I hear it this time. The Dominican. The waiter turns to me to translate. I do not interrupt him. Then he says, ‘But I’m only half from the DR. Here’s a challenge. If either of you guesses the other half, I’ll pay for both of your dinners’.

I’m slightly nervous playing this game as I’m the token Anglo here. Or is it ‘Angla’? ‘Um’. I’m silent. My husband pipes up. ‘German?’ Half German?’ The waiter says ‘nope!’ I offer up ‘Irish?’ What else am I going to say? Upon entering this establishment I noted I was the only white person in our section. Our server laughs happily at me and answers, ‘My people. Where did they all come from? They came in the surge’. He chuckles again. ‘You said that, not me’ I respond quietly.

‘I say what I want!’ he laughs again. ‘Your people…you know!’ And he rolls his eyes. I smile. It turns out the waiter’s other half is French. ‘Well, it’s hard to tell’ my spouse sighs. ‘I never would have guessed French. But I do recognize the sounds from the Dominican. They just say things a certain way. And Argentina and Brazil…that I’ve got. But all the others, I don’t’.

I look around the restaurant again. ‘French’ I offer. ‘Who would have guessed French?’ The waiter asks me about the generous tip and I tell him. ‘White guilt!’ He shakes his head. I chuckle. ‘I say what I want’. My turn. My husband and the waiter banter happily as we exit the restaurant.

Sitting in a meeting…the ‘OFFICE OF ACCOUTABILITY’…misspelled words splashed all across the neatly nauseating power point. Indeed.

I pity the man, the cog in the machine required to school us in the new lingo…’previous methodology’, ‘newly re-identified designation’, ‘different filters’ and ‘percent gap reduction’. Save us all.

Save the tentative first grader approaching me regularly with a carefully placed kiss on my right cheek and a murmured ‘I love you’…one English phrase she masters and likes to practice very, very quietly. Unkempt, shabby and given to lengthy procrastination in the cloak room…she is unable to manage her coat, boots, hat, mittens, book bag…I present to you the child through the looking glass…

As I keep my heart out of sight…

A little warming Irish schmaltz on yet another chilly March day…be ye warmed and filled…knowing that if one is Irish, the world will break one’s heart.

Oh Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling…from glen to glen and down the mountain side…the summer’s gone and all the roses falling…it’s you, it’s you, must go and I must bide.

But come ye back when summer’s in the meadow…or when the valley’s hushed and white with snow…it’s I’ll be here in sunshine or in shadow…Oh Danny boy, oh Danny boy, I love you so…

And so it goes…and so it goes…

Spring winds at my back; I can almost see her behind galleon clouds…faded Emerald Isle; resting side by side with family bones, rocky soil and troubles.

A simple jig plays, as I search for green velvet hedges and my own leprechaun while sailing home on sturdy roads.

Thinking of a photo of my Grandfather McMahon at the age of twelve…wearing no shoes and working in a factory…the man with the lovely tenor voice…

I close my eyes and remember Wesley Chapel as a child…feeling the freezing air leaking in from under the heavy metal doors, running the length of the altar rail, up the aisles, reaching and swirling around our ankles.

It is dark and we sit quietly under the shadows of the massive organ and pipes. The snow and ice winds and crystal sidewalks outside await while millions of heavy blowing white flakes swirl directionless outside the massive windows.

Seated between my parents…silence as we listen, enthralled, holding our collective breath…not wishing to disturb such perfection.

The smell of leather and old wool, fur and cologne and wet boots; halcyon air. There is a puddle on the floor in front of my seat and I twist my feet away from it.

There will be a bitterly cold walk to the frozen car later, but now I lean back in those turquoise seats…gazing up at the massive ceiling and the lights and I wonder what I would do up there on the catwalk…as ‘The Eyes of All’ suspends us, breathless in the cold…

Oh March, you oddity…neither here nor there, yet everywhere. The sort of month which finds flip flops in the kitchen and Wellingtons thrown into the back seat of the car; hot bowls of chili one day and a four year old asking for popsicles the very next moment.

The Ides of March with the grim accusations of disloyalty and violence…and the happy leprechaun dancing two days later with green abandon. You play your sillies while the winds off the lake rage against the side of the house and the street is white and thick with silence.

Perhaps I shall hazard a trip to the post office or I may peruse summer linens…

A little music, a little work, a soft shift in my mind…and I return to what was ‘then’…what used to be ‘now’.

Jim Croce sings and I’m attached to the phrase ‘runnin shine out of Alabam…’ How might those words be explained to any friend whose first language is not English? Doesn’t matter today. We’re ‘runnin shine’ in the sun…

I am resting in the ‘then’…a girl with long pigtails and pine tree sap in her hair…no pandemic, no virus, the creak of the yellow bus with the big black tires…lost faces, once upon a time…only dusty summer roads ahead.

I hear the late evening twang of crickets and the promise of the long summer trek to Dakota territory…

I couldn’t stop the rain, that heavy rain. It began deep in the night and it fell and fell. Just before the dawn you turned off the room fan so that I could listen more deeply.

February rains; how odd and disconcerting for it feels we are in March or April but I know I am in February and the gutters are full and filling up again and again and draining out and spilling over.

You left early for an appointment.

I lit a red candle, placed it on the night stand and crawled back into bed with a book and a pile of plumped up cushions.

But my thoughts are elsewhere as it rains and flows and soaks. Something is amiss when it pours in the month of hearts…

Mid March solitude with a full moon…spring has re-hidden herself and it’s hard to tell while the bright sunshine streaks the snow. It is a mere 14 degrees and this winter confuses us.

There are wind days and power outages and the threat of a looming Nor’easter…and recently we watched the infant heads of croci stretching up along the porch wall.

It is as if God lazily moves pieces around, observing the ebb and the flow. But…this is bad theology.

Rather, we spin like maddened wind up toys in the palm of His hand. He waits for us to settle…

‘My goodness, you’re tall’, he said while reaching across the table length for a cocktail napkin. ‘I mean tall in a good way…I mean’. He faltered slightly.

‘Thank you’, she replied. ‘I work hard at it’. He looked at her. ‘Work hard at what?’ He seemed puzzled. ‘At being tall’, she countered, reaching for her own napkin. ‘I work hard at being tall’.

He looked down sheepishly at his plate and spent what felt to him to be an inordinate amount of time working out the pattern of food spread in front of him. Dip, chips, min-sandwich, over priced crackers, non-descript glob of cheese spread; looking up shyly, he tried again.

‘So, what do you do?’ She turned slightly to the left of him and glanced out over his shoulder at nothing. ‘I work hard at being tall’, she said. ‘I work very hard’.

It was the sort of conversation which at the root of things, found itself rather far down the twisting rabbit trail of ‘I’d rather be anywhere else but here’.

She announced, ‘Perhaps today I shall learn to fly or to spin sugar webs’. She opted for flight, and in her mind she was already gone…

I was caught up in the aesthetics of the matter, not the practicality.

He could not eat his breakfast…so graciously wrapped, carried and presented to him in his shop. He could not eat because his hands were covered in grease.

The thought of providing him napkins slid through my mind as shilly shally and flim flam; wilted away with the promise of spring and the excitement of fine porcelain.

This is why he builds, and I build differently…