Blooming is a mood
Memorial Day to-do list
Wake up when your alarm goes off, because it’s Monday, and normally you would be organizing your child for the impending school day. Only it is not a school day. It is a holiday.
The Memorial Day parade is starting at 7:30. You are not going to the parade. It is too early for drums and you made the bad choice last night to stay up until 2 watching the latest episode of Euphoria, so hard no to wind instruments as well.
Here you are, walking out the front door, all dressed for the parade, because your house is on the parade route, and the noise plus the guilt you’ll feel about not participating in town life means there will be no more sleep for you this morning.
Yes, your daughter is wearing pajamas.
God, you need coffee.
These were definitely not the right jeans to wear, given that there will be doughnuts at the fire house, the last stop on the patriotic sojourn down the village’s main drag.
Wow, jelly doughnuts are so delicious. There is a version of the world where everyone eats jelly doughnuts every day without any health consequences and that world is a better world.
It is all you can do not to take a glazed doughnut for the road.
Bad coffee is still coffee, and this is an emergency.
Your daughter eats a chocolate frosted doughnut, then gets two more, one to take to a friend, and one to eat with the friend.
Why not take some photographs of the ultraviolet hydrangeas you run into on the way home?
New England and upstate New England take the prize for fall splendor, but no one does spring like the North Fork. It’s like the trees are trying to shock you with how
electric they are, and full. The flowers are merciless in their beauty, pink and purple irises (like what is that even, they’re almost prehistoric), explosive lilac. You’re stopping outside of strangers’ houses just to cavort with their blooms.
This moment is happiness.
Why can’t the rest of the world be like spring, glorious and shareable?
Why do I write these to-do lists?
