April First

By Beck

My 5 Minutes post today is late, late, late – and my excuse is that I totally forgot that it was Thursday and then when I DID remember (is it “remembering” when you overhear someone mention that today is Thursday? Because that’s what I did.) I wasn’t at home, and was, in fact, at my parent’s house where they have DIAL-UP.

Dial-up! Can you even imagine? The last time I had dial-up, I believe I was pregnant. With The Girl. So that is eleven years ago. But a lot of rural, out-of-the way places in Northern Ontario still only have dial-up and so there you are, waiting half an hour for your email to slowly roll in. But that’s all right – we said hi to the horse and hung out in the sandbox for a while and the kids pushed big rusty toy trucks around and I listened to the sandhill cranes flying back home again. Sandhill cranes sound like a little kid swinging on a rusty door, but in a good way. I also saw my first tulip of 2010.

 It’s April Fool’s Day today. My oldest views April Fool’s Day as some sort of personal responsibility, and so we woke up to tampered-with cereal and dyed milk and tissue paper stuffed in our shoes and my husband’s underwear sewn together, although possibly it was me who did that last one. She might have acquired her prankster genes honestly, since my idea of High Humour is to truly annoy the man I married and had ALL THESE KIDS with.

 You meet someone and you hit it off and the next thing you know you’re nearly 40 and you own a house and you have ACTUAL CHILDREN and A HUSBAND and all of the little choices that didn’t feel like they mattered all that much at the time add up to a life. And on bad days, all of those little choices can add up to feel like not very much at all, like life is some nasty prank that short-sheeting fate has decided to pull.

But on a good day… ah. It feels like coming out the front door and it’s suddenly spring and the fields are full of flowers I barely remember planting and the sky is full of birds, calling as they return home.