Still Bursting Forth

It was an unbelievably mild winter this year, with many 60 degree days in February, usually our coldest, snowiest month, and early March.  It was the warmest winter on record and the springtime blooms started to come out early this year.

But then there was a sustained cold snap in mid-March, with practically the only snowfall of the winter, and freezing temperatures for a three-day period.  It was feared that 90% of the nationally-renowned cherry blossoms would be suppressed this year by the quixotic winter weather, since the pink-hued blooms had already started to blossom early, shortly before the cold snap.  (2015.)

Usually late March and early April is a time of riotous spring colors, allowing milling throngs of crowds on the Mall and around the Tidal Basin to enjoy the seasonal explosion of soft-hued colors.  Nature is hardy, of course, and there was a blossoming forth, to a subdued degree, of the diminished colors this past weekend.

I hiked around the Tidal Basin on Saturday, enjoying the muted springtime splendor, walking six miles, 12,003 steps, according to the Fitbit in our midst.  The admiring crowds were ever-present as usual and the colors, although not brilliant and bursting-forth as usual, were present in a sparser quality and worthy of their world renown.  (2017.)

No title.

The crowning achievement in your life.

http://law.justia.com/cases/virginia/court-of-appeals-unpublished/2004/1714034.html

Don't forget to sign up for medicare.

Maybe next year

Jimmy, Johnny and Danny are my three sons.  All of them have birthdays during the first two months of the year.  (Here's to you, John.)

Twelve, fourteen and fourteen years is how long it's been since I knowingly laid eyes on any one of them.  The last knowing communication I had from any of them was ten years ago.  (Here's to you, Jim Rogers.)

Their mother stonily refuses to tell me a single thing about them, even to say whether they are alive or not.  That's a person with a stone-cold heart, and she raised, from their adolescence on, our children to have similarly hard hearts.  (And here's to you, Dan (and Laura).)

On each one's birthday (and all Federal and religious holidays) I go to the same restaurant at noon for lunch near where they lived nearby as they became young men under her tutelage, when they learned how easy it was to circumvent court orders governing visitation and custody by merely becoming scofflaws.  What was the remedy for the shut-out parent supposed to be, to try to get the other parent (or them) thrown into jail for contempt of court?  (Good times from 2001, just before the parental alienation began in earnest (PAS).)

So that's my routine whenever I'm in town (which is almost always) those days, to try to keep alive some potential channel of communication and rapprochement.  As these three now-fully mature men climb into their thirties, I'll keep up the routine for as long as I can and maybe someday… .  😉