The corner has been turned. Yesterday was cloudy but still felt warm. After the winter we’ve had, the low 50’s are tropical. I sat on my deck for a while and wished I had a drink with an umbrella and a piece of pineapple. Gracie sleeps on the deck and her fur gets hot to the touch. So many flowers have bloomed now. The hyacinths are the most recent adding some purple to the yard.

Tonight Captain Frosty’s opens. The boards are off the windows. In some places birds return, the cherry blossoms bloom and the gardens fill with flowers, all announcing the coming of spring and summer. For us the first sign of the changing season is when Captain Frosty’s opens. My friends and I are going to first night dinner, another one of our rituals. I can just taste that shrimp, the corn fritter and those amazing onions rings. It’s a happy day!

When I was a kid, it was hearing the ice cream man’s bell which announced the changing of the seasons. Johnny came up the hill and parked his truck in its usual spot as if it had been yesterday instead of a year ago when he was last here. We all ran home for a nickel or, if we were lucky, a dime. A nickel bought a popsicle and a dime brought so many different choices. I liked chocolate covers but my favorite was a drumstick. The vanilla ice cream had hard chocolate and nuts covering it. The cone was always soft, and after I finished the ice cream, I ate the cone, a sugar cone. My dad, who worked for Hood’s Ice Cream, told me that my drumstick is called an ice cream novelty. I think that name fits a drumstick perfectly.

This morning I read my two papers and a phrase, seldom heard any more, was written in one column. I don’t even remember what it was, but it sent me off on a tangent wondering what will happen to all the neat words and phrases of my generation. It seems sort of silly for woman of 67, almost 68, to say groovy. Nobody bums a smoke any more, nobody smokes. My brother and I yelled dibs when we reserved a seat in the car, usually it was dibs on a window seat. Drop a dime is gone forever. Where was the last pay phone you saw?Remember always checking the change slot in case someone left a dime. I found one a couple of times. On dates guys tried to get to second base or even go all the way. It usually started with making out. Luckily some of the lingo survives. You can still flip the bird, catch some rays or wear shades.

Every new generation needs its own vocabulary. It’s a sort of teen rebellion to break from our parents and speak in tongues they don’t understand. The problem is that vocabulary, like all the previous, will be replaced when a new generation takes center stage. How uncool all of that is, a real bummer.