The Front Yard

It’s ironic, that so many of the things that were priorities early in my life are at the opposite end of the spectrum today.  I have never been a fanatic about my yard but I like for it to at least have some grass in it, which was challenging with two very active boys and all of their friends.  I would try to get the boys to take their golf carts, bicycle ramps, and four-wheelers into the woods behind the house so they didn’t tear up the grass and create bald spots. In spite of my urging, our yard often had dead spots from campfires (some authorized, some not) craters from homemade bombs (some authorized, some not) and long strands of missing sod because of sliding stops on bicycles and the unbridled acceleration of a go-cart.

The Driveway 

Later as the boys starting driving I had to remind them to slow down on our long gravel drive because their speeding trucks would cause large potholes and wash-board ruts in the driveway.  The biggest speeding offender, however, was Libby because her mind was usually somewhere else as she propped her elbow on the car door and twirled her hair, never realizing that she was going in and out of our driveway at 45 mph! (I know this because I was in the car on several occasions and pointed at the speedometer).

Anniversary Dates 

I have always possessed an amazing ability to forget important dates, so much so, that before our wedding my groomsmen gave me a dive watch with our wedding date engraved on the back to help me remember our anniversary.  Embarrassingly enough, I looked at the back of that watch often in the ensuing years just to make sure I didn’t forget to buy Libby an anniversary gift, but even with that mnemonic device attached to my wrist, I still managed to forget our anniversary few times.

It seems silly now, years later, that I couldn’t (or wouldn’t) take the time to commit to memory such an important date, but at the time my priorities were different because so many things seemed (to me at least) more important, such as working on the house, keeping the cars repaired, and building a business to provide the financial means to do it all.

Grieve and Regrets

Grieve has a strange way of bringing up seemingly unrelated items at odd times like it did this morning with these three seemingly unrelated memories. The cruel irony is that those same dates I once struggled to remember, plus some new more somber dates, are forever seared into my brain and I am unable to forget them, even on warm spring days like today when I sit alone on my front porch swing and look out over my lush, green, unblemished yard flanked by a perfectly smooth driveway.