Real Life Reflections

My daffodils. Every year they begin to poke their little heads out of the ground in February. Some years they go so far as to fully bloom in the middle of winter only to have a major dumping of snow plopped on their beautiful, cheerful, bright yellow skin. I can't even remember when I planted these bulbs, but the tulips I planted with them stopped coming up years ago. The daffodils, much to my pleasure, refuse to follow suit. For a number of years now, only a few of these narcissus beauties have bloomed. I've tried dividing them, planting them deeper, fertilizing, and massive mulching, but nothing I did resulted in more blooms even though the plants themselves seemed to multiply and take more ground. I'd pretty much come to the conclusion that it was time to dig them up and start over with fresh bulbs. Then came the long hard winter. Sleet, snow, and ice along with below normal temps abounded for a longer-than-normal length of time this year. February came and went w...

As a child, I loved our family dinners. The eight of us sat around the kitchen table. So much laughter! So many arguments! My dad used to yell above the din, "Only three talking at a time!" As my older siblings became teenagers, they got involved with extracurricular activities, and they got jobs that took them from our family dinners, but there were still evenings, though not many of them, when no one had to rush off. Periodically, on those rare evenings, someone would pull out a deck of cards. Our game of choice was "Murder," but every now and again we'd play "Are You Happy?" Each player drew a card from the deck. The card you drew dictated whether or not you were happy - the higher the card, the happier you were. Play went around the table, and each player made their declaration. There is, of course, more to the game than that, but since this isn't a game blog, I'll leave the details to someone else. Sometimes...okay, most of the time......