04.05.04 - 12:54 p.m.

Le sigh.

I was writing early, hap-hazard and slap-dash and every other phrase that suggests the off-the-cuff observations (woo: three clich�s in how many minutes? do I win the prize?) about the sky: today, clear, after what seems to have been a month of cold rainy days. In truth, it was sunny on Saturday, but I didn't see much of Saturday from the appropriate side, something I prefer not to let happen anymore. It's the sunlight: slant-wise and blissful, simmering the day away. I don't like to work when the sun isn't out, which is why I usually spend so much time a-waiting for it to go down, so I can sit around and do nothing.

Springtime, but it still feels like winter. I have a still-pretty-miserable cold, and the air is crisp and raw. The grass doesn't seem to have gotten the memo, that winter is lingering a bit longer, and everything's so green it seems like a fairy land. I remember this from last year, too: the little violets that bloom in the grass, dark purple, undercoloring the green so that it seems shadowed, fringed in rich sweet berry-blue.

In honor of spring, I made a spinach-strawberry-almond salad, which was lovely, of course. It was lovely because strawberries are lovely, at this time of year, and inexpensive and red and melting sweet as cotton candy, with just enough rough-textured flesh to remind you that it isn't all easy, this fruit-of-the-vine thing. I put the salad in a bread basket I made - literally, a basket made out of bread, woven and whatnot, bordered by more braided bread, a geuine feat that was way too much fun to make, and even more fun to see come out of the oven, and to parade around for everyone to admire. I felt so darn clever, coming up with that, except I didn't actually come up with it, I just stole it from a magazine.

Now, of course, I'm stuffed. As usual, there was too much food. As usual, some people gathered a bit late, showing up, grabbing plates, and disappearing as if they were the gang of sketchy kids who hung around on the far side of the addition in elementary school, the kids who had long, greasy hair and tucked sticks behind their ears like cigarettes, or cigarettes behind their ears like sticks.

Winter-spring, spring-winter. I always used to buy a new dress for Easter: but no longer. Not for a while. Whatever production Easter was when I was a kid and a teenager, it has lost that showiness. Now I just want to get through the service, avoid the vigil, come home and get through dinner. Maybe that can change, too. My house: I'm still waiting for my house. Or, rather, I'm still searching for my house. Yesterday, we went driving around looking at houses in my price range. I need to look through a few more listings, but I think I'm ready to make an offer on something new. I still don't have my money back from my little house on the hill, and we drove by it on Sunday and it still had the Sale Pending addition to the For Sale sign that made my heart seize and skip scattered beats, and filled my stomach with the vague indigestion signaling sheer freakin' dread.

Sale no longer pending. :( Poor little house. My poor little house: I would've been good for you, but you might have been too much for me, with your trees and their branches leaning over the property line, with your leaf mold and your debris, with your sheafe of papers carefully maintained by the last owner-owner, the current deadbeat's father or grandfather, each payment on the roof or parking pad carefully, painstakingly noted on his little record books. Poor little house with the broken pool cue thrown in among the rafters: I wanted you but they didn't fix the floor joists properly and your porch foundation was bulging out. I liked standing on your porch and hearing nothing, hearing the wind and I liked standing on your back porch and looking up at that big fat tree, the little see-ment benches. I bet you were purty, once upon a time.

I miss my house: I imagined myself living there. The den was exactly the writing nook I want, with the big sliding glass doors opening onto the wooded back yard: open and private at once. I haven't found another house with as private a backyard, and I doubt that I will. Cleaner, more level, in better shape: sure.

Poor house. :(