The sky is cloudy white, and there was a mist earlier when I stood on the deck watching Gracie in the yard. Pine pollen has arrived, and my outside table top is green. I worked on the deck yesterday, and it is summer ready. All the plants were potted and the feeders filled, but the birds haven’t found the seeds yet. The red spawn of Satan did.

Humor changes over time. Being a kid meant being a bit gross and sometimes even a bit insensitive. Milk spurting from someone’s nose used to be one of the funniest things we’d ever seen. It sent us into spasms of laughter. Someone tripping and falling set us off as well. We’d try not to laugh but just couldn’t help ourselves. Catching a nose picker was a bonanza. We’d whisper and point and laugh. My father reprimanding us was sometimes far too funny. As he spoke, he’d be pointing and then tapping our chests with his finger, and we’d be holding back from laughing right out loud. My father often accused me of smirking. He was right. I was a great smirker. We were never mean or malicious. We just took advantage and laughed at anyone’s ill fortune. We were being kids.

In college we laughed all the time, sometimes at each other. That hadn’t changed from when we were little, but it had gotten a bit more sophisticated over time. If someone droned on, we’d all pretend to go asleep or turn our backs to the speaker who’d get indignant enough to make us laugh. Quick wits and snappy comebacks became our humor.

As adults, we still love the snappy comeback, and a good one rates a finger or two and an expletive from the victim. When we play games, we laugh all the time and make fun of each other, good-humored fun. Sometimes, in the middle of a sip, we laugh so much we spurt coke but never from our noses. We seem to have out-grown that.