Hello to spring, finally. It is a beautiful morning. The sunlight is so bright everything in the backyard glistens. The sky is a deep blue and cloudless. The air is so calm not even a single leaf is moving. The dogs are out and have been out for a while. They are my barometer.

When I was a kid, I noticed spring more than any other season. The air had a lightness. Color returned in the riot of flowers growing in the gardens. Winter clothes got packed away. The days got longer and longer. The sluggish feelings of winter disappeared. The warmth brought energy, a need to savor every day. A spring in my step was real.

Why do we have toast in the morning, instead of just bread? Who decided to first toast bread? I slather my toast with butter or jam because of its dryness. Mostly I have toast with my eggs though occasionally I have an English muffin, toasted.

I always try foods when I travel. I don’t like to judge the strange dishes by appearances. I also don’t like to ask the ingredients of what I’m eating. I eat the food, and if I like it, I keep eating. If not, I just push the plate away. It was in Ghana when I first became an adventurous eater. I remember when I ate my first dinner at my Ghanaian family’s house during training. I was alone on the balcony outside my bedroom. The food was on a table so I sat down to eat. It was a bowl filled with stew, a white blob and some bony meat. I had no one around to ask what I was eating so I dug right in using my right hand as there were no utensils. I ate almost all of my first real Ghanaian food, whatever it was, leaving only a bit of broth. I liked it.

My dance card for the week is again uke heavy. I have my usual practice and lesson and also two concerts. We are playing The Beach Boys this week. I also have a dump run and animal food shopping on my list. I need to vacuum. That will satisfy my cleaning bug.

I wrote this on a past Mother’s Day. I don’t think I could write better than this about my mother.

Special days have special posts. 

Today is Mother’s Day. It is the day I honor my mother and my memories of her. Every year I post basically this same entry with only a few little changes. 

I am amazed at how long ago I lost my mother. Sometimes it seems like a day while other times it feels like forever. I keep her close always, in my heart. 

My mother was amazing. She was generous, fun to be with and was the perfect martyr when she needed to be, a skill I think most mothers have. It was her tone of voice so filled with pain that caused our guilt to well to the surface. “I’ll do it myself,” she’d say. We’d scurry to do whatever she wanted. She was tricky, that woman.

My sisters and I laugh often about the curses she inflicted on us: the love of everything Christmas and never thinking you have enough presents for everyone, giving Easter baskets overflowing with candy and fun toys and surprising people with a gift just because.

My mother had a generosity of spirit. She was funny and smart and the belle of every ball. She always had music going in the kitchen as she worked so she could sing along. She played Frank and Tony and Johnny and from her I learned the old songs. My mother drew all the relatives to her, and her house was filled on holidays and weekends. My cousins visited often. She was their favorite aunty. My mother loved to play Big Boggle, and we’d sit for hours at the kitchen table and play so many games we’d lose track of the time. Christmas was always amazing, and she passed this love to all of us. We traveled together, she and I, and my mother was game for anything. I remember Italy and my mother and me after dinner at the hotel bar where she’d enjoy her cognac. She never had it any other time, but we’re on vacation she said and anything goes. I talked to her just about every day, as did my sisters. I loved it when she came to visit. We’d shop, have dinner out then play games at night. I always waited on her when she was here. I figured it was the least I could do.

My mother loved extreme weather shows, TV judges and crime. She never missed watching Judge Judy. She also liked quiz shows and she and I used to play Jeopardy together on the phone at night. She always had a crossword puzzle book with a pen inside on the table beside her chair, and I used to try to fill in some of the blanks. On the dining room table was often a jigsaw puzzle, and we all stopped to add pieces on the way to the kitchen. My mother loved a good time.

She did get feisty, and I remember flying slippers aimed at my head when I was a kid and one time a dictionary, a big dictionary, was thrown which luckily missed me though the binding broke when it hit the wall. I pointed that out to her and that made her madder. She expertly used mother’s guilt on us, her poor victims. We sometimes drove her crazy, and she let us know, none too quietly. We never argued over politics. She kept her opinions close. We sometimes argued over other things, but the arguments never lasted long.

Even after all this time, I still think to reach for the phone to call my mother when I see something interesting or have a question I know only she can answer, but then in a split second I remember. When I woke up this morning, my first thought was of her, and how much she is missed. No one ever told me how hard it would be. Happy Mother’s Day, Mom!