hmph

tomorrow I turn 38. My oldest child informed me that I absolutely have to have a party. Sensing my reluctance, she said I need to at least invite a few friends over for coffee. I want to make some brownies, but my body is still out of whack from the sugar consumed last weekend. Might do it anyway, I'm already a crampy mess. My dafodils are starting to bust open, just barely, but there's some bright yellow poking out of the tops of their buds. One or two of the dwarf dafs are blooming already! And what little scraggely forsythia that I haven't been able to completely remove from my backyard is also starting to bloom. For me, my birthday has always symbolized the end of winter and the beginning of spring. I hate winter. The year we lived in Connecticut when I was little, all I wanted for my birthday was for the snow to melt, and it did, well, at least it finally started to melt in places anyway. It had been a terribly cold winter that year (1976, I think it was), record lows, the blizzard of the century, talk of another ice age because up in Buffalo the previous year's snow hadn't completely melted before it started snowing again. New Haven was a very interesting place, though, and I'm glad I got that experience. There was the smell of old books everywhere. There I saw my first Pollack painting and my first Picasso. The Pollack was a really big deal, and our 2nd grade class went to see it. I think Yale had just acquired it, and it seems they hung it in the library. I couldn't take my eyes off it, and when the teacher asked me what I thought of it, I remember saying "I like it, that's the sort of painting I could do!" LOL