The day is warm at  71°. My birds have been busy at the feeders all morning. The chickadees, my stalwarts, have been replaced by a catbird, goldfinches, cardinals, titmice, Baltimore orioles and nuthatches. A blue jay drops by and scares away the smaller birds so I shoo him off once he’s had his fill. Sometimes I think I must be watching a Disney cartoon. Yesterday I saw a nuthatch fill up on seed then he flew to a nearby branch and fed another nuthatch, just as large so probably not a baby. The cardinal pair are the same. He feeds her the seed. I keep expecting music and ribbons and the sounds of tweeting birds and fluttering wings.

IGNORE THIS (EXCEPT FOR THE NEW PICTURE PART)! Coffee has a new look because the other theme was too difficult to work with when saving pages. The old posts didn’t appear in their entirety. This header space is too short for the other picture so I used a another one, also sent to me by Morphy. He was kind enough to do three or four different pictures for Coffee when I moved to WordPress. All that’s new is the picture, but I’m still looking for a theme which allows me to copy the posts without spending hours.

This morning has already been far too busy for me. Usually I loll around with coffee and the papers then I switch to coffee and a book. This morning I have already changed my bed, done a wash, put the trash in the car and swept the kitchen floor. I’m exhausted.

School is finished here for the summer on Wednesday, and I don’t have to imagine how those kids will feel as I still remember celebrating my last days of school. They always filled me with a sense of freedom, with an I can do anything I want feeling. The whole summer was mine, at least it was until the summer after I graduated from high school when I got my first job, and I would have one every summer after that until I graduated from college.

I spent those kid summers sweaty and dirty and loved every minute of them. I rode my bike everywhere. I was gone from early morning until near dinner time. The uniform of the day was always shorts, a sleeveless blouse and sneakers. Gas stations were pit stops and so were the woods. The town had lots of woods back then, and we’d ride on the pine needle covered paths with trees shading us on each side. I remember a spring in the woods where people brought bottles to fill. We’d put our sweaty heads under the running water to cool down then we’d jump back on our bikes. We still had much more world left to discover.