Peeking into the rock

Everybody else seems to have their "Friday Something Blogging." I've been dithering because the things I take pictures of are only around part of the year. So I decided I would do that: seasonal pictures.

( Two pictures below the cut: laying pipe and slitting the plastic in a berry field on Calabasas Road )

So. Today is the sixteenth anniversary of my mother's death. For maybe the first time, I'm not messed up about it. I was thinking today about something else. I don't know what it means.

Emma's going to turn twenty in a few months. When my mother was twenty, my brother was a year old.

Frank will turn twenty-eight on the same day. When I was twenty-eight, Frank was two.

So maybe when one or the other of them is thirty-six, their firstborn will be three?

Lately Gloria's been having days when she's not sure how to manage underpants. She gets dressed without them and then doesn't feel right and she needs to have them shown and explained to her. Then she puts them on right and she feels better. She has this thing about filling up her already very heavy purse with objects. Gloves, combs, brushes, hankies, partial rolls of toilet paper, socks, and now lately underwear. And rubber-banded stacks of ancient bank statements. On bad days she starts panicking about leaving the house. No, she wants to leave the house -- too early to go to the things she's supposed to go to. Today, since she wanted to leave the house two hours early I made her go to this little shopping center and walk a whole block to the store called "Susie's Deals" where I found presentable clothes for $5 each (I now feel the need to throw away twice as many clothes as I bought). That much standing up and walking was sufficient to cause her hip and knee pain the rest of the day. This may be because she's dug up an older pair of leather sneakers and they might be throwing her gait off. Also, I missed "The L Word" because she wanted to see "Everything is Illuminated" and then she kept wandering around finding things to fret about myhsteriously.

And of course you understand that Groundhog Day is more or less sixish weeks from the Spring Equinox, right? So if the groundhog sees his shadow, which he will on most days, there will be six months more of winter. Because they will. You've got to admire a joke that nobody even tries to get. A sleeper, maybe.