a "park" of my very own . . .

not that I have anything to write . . .

I finally broke down and added two of my secret obsessions--music and local histories--to my profile :-) tonight. Can't figure out what to do with this year's technology and literacy focus, though. Is this also a simple pleasure or does it really just belong on my other (techie) blog, which I've been seriously avoiding . . .? It's a little like my blog about why I am not a writer (NOT!). I wrote the perfect intro piece for that blog two summers ago, emailed it to the individual who was the catalyst for that state of (non)being/blog, shared it with a group of close friends (some of whom had had similar experiences)--and I was over not being a writer! But the empty blog is symbolic, somehow . . .

This week's simple pleasure? Last Saturday with the "babies," teaching them the swing song I grew up with . . . Watching them explore the new family car their parents surprised them with . . . Michael's first reaction--What on earth were they thinking about???--morphing into This is the best thing you ever bought for us!

I've never owned a black car, in or out, and doubt I ever will. But their new car brought back this one, one of my first ever memories . . .

On the back of the photo are these words, a message my mother wrote from me to my grandfather across the sea, the grandfather whose hat I threw out of an upstairs window somewhere across the gray Atlantic a few months before this photo was taken, the grandfather I would not again, in this world, see . . .

Fevrier 1950

Bon baisers a Grand daddy

Memories are everything . . . the best of life's simple pleasures . . .

so now it's New Year's Eve. . . and I'm bloggin'

not your ordinary holiday, or is it?

Michael at play

All aboard!

Down the slide!!

Pedaling a Big Wheel!!!

and Caught swinging

.....finally!!!!!!!!!!

Michael is 3 !!!

but last summer...

Swings I have known...

When I was five...

There were only five

on that summerlike New Year's Day...

The swing needs another coat of paint this spring...

Is there room enough for seven?

The hammock swing is my favorite...

Its clone lives on Michael's screen porch :-)

(see picture at top of this post).

Not sure the place they came from exists any more.

That was also where I discovered

the wind chimes (also cloned)

tuned to minor keys...

when he was two...

Michael in his toy box.