It’s eighteen degrees right now. Tomorrow, it’ll be eighty. Missouri weather is a little like life: it doesn’t have to make sense, it is what it is, and you make the most with how it comes.
Yesterday, I tried to do taxes. I had little success. My greatest efforts were in cleaning off my desk that, though it seems to me I do very little work upon it (always reading, writing, and bringing tasks to the kitchen table for before the house awakes), whenever I return in attempt at such, it is layered in mail and other layers of accumulation that it takes a fair amount of time (at my pace) to clean and organize away.
Perks of the task: in cleaning, I have plenty of open and discarded mail for the fire Owen wants to build in the backyard. We planned to make one last night, but instead Bridgette—the baseball mother nature coming out in its proper time—initiated watching the World Baseball Classic game between Venezuela and Italy, and so we did (I fell asleep a time or two in my grandfather’s Lazy Boy; its magical effect in casting sleep spells transcendent through generations). I found one bill and three checks and, combined, we came out a little ahead.
I lifted weights last evening. It’s been a few weeks (a month…not really sure). Matthew and I began on a program and schedule. He didn’t have weights as a class this semester, and so we put in the work. His coach tracked him down in the hall and asked him about it. Matthew explained, and his coach said he’d get it changed for him, and did. Two weights sessions of conflicting schedules didn’t really work, and I defaulted to letting the house sleep in the mornings rather than wake to my throwing around of weight and metal.
Yesterday evening, nobody to worry about getting their proper rest, I got back on the rack. I like lifting legs and whole-body, not the pretty lifts. I’ve always liked the lifts that do something more than make you look “big.” I did squats, and by third set—not that the weight was heavy—I could feel my legs go tight and spent some time stretching and loosing back before finishing the sets. By the end of it all, last evolution planks on a mat, my legs were wobbling and shaking and it felt good to know I’d put in enough effort to feel that way again (from strength and not unsought effect from complacency and age).
I am excited for the day. Warm winds and air are coming. We will build fence and finalize farm projects in the prevalent farm-state of “nearly done” that get delayed and as such are often long-delayed to attain of “finished” term. It is almost planting season, and if we do not finish soon, it will be summer before we return to them again—and so we focus.
I am excited most for coming home. For two days, Owen’s checked the concrete pad and basketball hoop base and anchor we set together. It is dried, set and hardened. Today, we’ll put the rest together; a home project, like those of farm, that—if not finished soon—may long delay if in the fields (you never know when the planting will start. You go and “try it,” and if it runs, you don’t stop until weather or all the ground is done).
I am excited to build the hoop with him. I’m excited to play together, to know—or hope: for days, seasons, and years—that I will see and hear his dribble when I come home, his arc of shot and playing in the yard—outside—as I believe that all boys should. He wore an old hoop out, and I am excited for this one to stand—for his childhood—and the childhood of his own children when they come home like the one at my folks where he still plays and lowers down to lowest height to dunk just as I did at ten.
Great moments and memories don’t need to be extravagant. They just need to be special. To live times with my kids, to see them play and enjoy just as I did, are a few of mine.
I’m ready for the spring, for it to stay and stick around, but even should the cold return and it doesn’t all make sense—as Missouri weather teaches—we’ll enjoy and make the most in whatever that arrives.