SweetClover of Trill
Mar. 16th, 2025 09:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ismoLast night I was absolutely too beat to blog, after getting up too early to attend an all-day retreat with acres of young people, at which I extroverted for nearly 10 hours and stood around a lot and also sat on church-basement type chairs a lot. They are always painful, no matter what shape they are. There was a rare break in the action, during the recreation period in which I had learned to play a new game that made me feel extraordinarily slow and old. My fellow players were all college students or people not long out of college. The game is called Decrypto. It's a very subtle kind of word game, at which I should excel, and I got the hang of it after awhile, but I still felt as if my brain had been wrapped in a woolly blanket. I went outside for a breath of air and a few moments of solitude after the game. The air was amazingly warm, but the wind was roaring violently through the trees. I was sitting on a picnic bench under a clump of trees, and actually felt the ground shuddering under my feet as the roots were rocked by the thrashing of their branches up above. Thinking of the tree that crashed down in our yard last summer, I decided I didn't care to sit under the trees any more! I looked across the road to the cornfields, and saw that the air was full of a strange haze, like smoke. But unlike the wildfire smoke of last year, this was dust blowing in from Texas and Oklahoma. I found out later that for some hours yesterday, we had the worst air quality in the nation.
My joints were so stiff and sore this morning that I felt as if I were stumping around on wooden legs. We pulled ourselves together enough to get to church. This involved more standing and kneeling, also hard on the joints. We were sitting up front in Kid Territory, which is always very charming and enjoyable. We meant to creep off home to skulk in our lair, but ran into a friend who urged us to come to breakfast in the basement. More church basement chairs! We sat with her family, including her mother, who has dementia and doesn't know my name, but recognizes me and always greets me by grabbing my hands and crying, "My friend!" One of the little boys sat next to me, and asked me how old I was. I told him I was quite old, almost as old as his grandmother--74! At this point my granny friend said, "I'm 88! I'm older than you!" I ceded her the victory.
I was about to collapse on the couch when I finally did get home, but I remembered that I had been planning to cook the corned beef tonight, since tomorrow is a gym night and the Sparrowhawk won't have leisure to enjoy it. I got that into the oven, plus a side pan of onions, carrots, and cabbage with dill, and cut up all the strawberries, as I had promised myself I would. And THEN I sat down and had some tea. Last night there was a long cold rain as the wind blew the cold front in. Yesterday evening, I saw that the daffodil shoots that came up in the last few days were showing buds, and two purple crocuses were blooming. This afternoon, the cold rain turned to snow. We caved and took a nap, and when we woke up, a thin layer of snow over everything made it look as if we'd turned back the clock by a month. I'm glad the daffodils hadn't bloomed yet. Snow on the daffodils is lovely but way too poignant.
My joints were so stiff and sore this morning that I felt as if I were stumping around on wooden legs. We pulled ourselves together enough to get to church. This involved more standing and kneeling, also hard on the joints. We were sitting up front in Kid Territory, which is always very charming and enjoyable. We meant to creep off home to skulk in our lair, but ran into a friend who urged us to come to breakfast in the basement. More church basement chairs! We sat with her family, including her mother, who has dementia and doesn't know my name, but recognizes me and always greets me by grabbing my hands and crying, "My friend!" One of the little boys sat next to me, and asked me how old I was. I told him I was quite old, almost as old as his grandmother--74! At this point my granny friend said, "I'm 88! I'm older than you!" I ceded her the victory.
I was about to collapse on the couch when I finally did get home, but I remembered that I had been planning to cook the corned beef tonight, since tomorrow is a gym night and the Sparrowhawk won't have leisure to enjoy it. I got that into the oven, plus a side pan of onions, carrots, and cabbage with dill, and cut up all the strawberries, as I had promised myself I would. And THEN I sat down and had some tea. Last night there was a long cold rain as the wind blew the cold front in. Yesterday evening, I saw that the daffodil shoots that came up in the last few days were showing buds, and two purple crocuses were blooming. This afternoon, the cold rain turned to snow. We caved and took a nap, and when we woke up, a thin layer of snow over everything made it look as if we'd turned back the clock by a month. I'm glad the daffodils hadn't bloomed yet. Snow on the daffodils is lovely but way too poignant.
