It wasn’t until 10 o’clock that I woke up this morning. Gracie was sleeping beside me with her head on the other pillow and Fern was sleeping against my leg. I have no idea where Maddie was, but she came in the room when she heard us stirring. The morning was perfect for sleeping, cool and cloudy, so we all took advantage. Since then I have been piddling around and all of a sudden I realized how late it had gotten so here I am. The weather for the rest of the week is predicted to be like today: cloudy and maybe rainy. I was going to go to the movies but so will everyone else. The rule of thumb is no movie on a rainy or cloudy day because the tourists are all there.

The birds have been really active today, and for the first time in a long time, a goldfinch is back. They used to be frequent visitors. I saw a male cardinal earlier and a few finches at the small feeder. A spawn of Satan has already emptied one of the feeders. I watched him hanging by his feet from a branch as he ate upside down. The blasted red squirrel is also around. He is most decidedly evil. I have seen him harassing the gray spawns, and he has scolded me on many occasions. He is also small enough to fit inside the squirrel proof bars on the other feeders. If I had a sling shot, that red squirrel would be in my cross hairs (I know slingshots don’t have them. I was being figurative).

I can hear lawns being mowed, kids playing in their front yards and dogs barking. My quiet neighborhood wakes up like this every Saturday morning. It always reminds me of when I was a kid, and Saturday was the nosiest day of the week. Everybody was outside talking to each other as they did the week’s chores. My mother and our neighbor each had their own clothes lines, but they were together in rows. My mother had the first three lines and our neighbor the second three. It was the same in every backyard. The houses were all duplexes in the project where we lived. My street had three duplexes while the whole project had twelve. The rest of the houses were up the hill and   around a small rotary. The last house was beside the parking lot nobody used except us kids.  It was where we went roller skating.

Every lawn got mowed on Saturday. It was a point of pride in my neighborhood to have a healthy green lawn. Neighbors whose lawns were scraggly and had patches of sand were talked about by the fathers who pushed the hand mowers every Saturday. Most early evenings I could hear the sprinklers. The metal ones always made noises when they whirled. My dad used to turn his onbefore coming into the house when he got home from work.

My dad, his whole life, used a blade lawn mower. He swore it cut the grass better than any other other kind. We’d offer to buy a gas mower for Father’s Day, but he always said no. He loved cutting the grass in that back and forth pattern he’d perfected over the years. He would never let us cut the grass. We didn’t do it right. I miss the sound of that mower, and I miss watching my dad cut his lawn.