It has been years since I did anything special for Saint Patrick's Day. It has never been a big holiday in my life, especially since my binge drinking years were brief and over a very long time ago. I've always found it an odd collection of rituals, everyone both proudly claiming Irish ancestry, while at the same time perpetuating the most denigrating stereotypes. Americans are funny that way. We get so wrapped up in where our families are "from," but we insist we reject all notions of caste, breeding, or hereditary power. If we have any chance at the egalitarian ideals of our founding documents, then would we not want to stop separating ourselves by region? I've always been more proud of the fact that I am a mutt, without focusing on any one of the countries or continents where my great grandparents lived. I want to know who they were, certainly, but not so I can dance around, drunk, dressed in caricatures of them.
I'm not really in that sour of a mood, I promise. I'm feeling pretty good, truth be told. I'm relaxed, well fed, and entertained. Other than some little jerk deciding to eat one of my green bean seedlings and drag the starter bag around the ground floor to play with it, spreading tiny little clumps of wet soil everywhere, nothing has gone wrong today. Even getting blood drawn this morning was a success. Usually, it's a repeat-stick nightmare, trying to puncture one of my tiny, rubbery veins. But the phlebotomist got me first try, in a vein in my lower bicep, so smoothly I never felt a thing. Bless her.
I walked in the rain, taking pictures of my soggy flowers, taking note of what is emerging now. It's a very exciting time for me. I found fig leaves, big clumps of green breaking out on my oak leaf hydrangea, and even some blossoms on the tea olive I am holding captive in a pot up front. The smell was divine. I trudged out through the wetlands to look at the forsythia again, and still no change. I know it's alive. It's just torturing me.
A word about today's song: it really has no bearing on anything I intended to write. I heard it on the way to the lab, and have not been able to get rid of the earworm, no matter what I've listened to (or watched on the Voice) since. I'm starting to think the only way to push it out of my head is by picking up another, more pernicious earworm. I'm really afraid of what that song might be.
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