. Spinning .

I know that I should, but I’m not going to color eggs this year.  Without the family for dinner here, I’m the only one that eats them,though I will hard-boil some for baszcht (the milk/vinegar/kielbasi water soup with zypki [dried Polish mushrooms]) because in our family we throw the potatoes, eggs and kielbasi right into the soup.

Heard from my niece in Spain, and she suggested that next year we spend Easter in Poland.  That’s kind of a neat idea.  May even look up the family tree.  My dad was born here, but at around age eight they went back and lived in Poland for a year.

In the meantime, my holiday is like all of them; framing customers want their stuff and they take priority.  Kind of always puts a damper on the enjoyment of the holidays for me, and Easter has always been a biggie in Polish tradition. 

Didn’t even buy a new pair of Mary Janes this year.

Another four a.m. Thursday.  My head is uncovered, I am kissed and hear a whisper, "You don’t have to get up yet.  Where are my boots?"

Men cannot find things.  Women can.  I suggest a couple places to look then give up and groggily go out to the kitchen, where he points to the floor by the door where they should be.  Men do this all the time.  Show you the empty space where they think something should be because that’s where they last remember seeing them, or got used to seeing them.  I stare at the empty spot.  Nope, I don’t see them there either. 

I send him out to look in the garage, and tell him to check his car, since I recall seeing him carrying them with him to work last week when a mid-day snowstorm threatened.  I head down the cellar, knowing they’re probably in the car, but just to show my enthusiastic assistance in the search. 

He comes back inside just as I’m topping the stairs to the kitchen.  "They were in the car.  Sorry,"  he says.  I smile smugly but say nothing.  "I’m going to make your lunch and go back to bed," I tell him.  "Wake me when you leave."

He wakes me at five am to tell me the snowblower ran out of steam on a narrow section of driveway, and tells me to go back to sleep.  I do.

I wake at six am.  He is gone.  His lunch is on the kitchen counter.

I have a very expensive pair of wirecutters for my framing.  They cut wire wonderfully well, and fingers too.

Starting to look like Christmas around here rather than Easter.  Gave myself the proverbial kick to get hoppin’ on framing because I’ve let things disintegrate in the hope that the customers would as well.  Forgive my bluntness, but I’ve been avoiding the issue of serious depression that doesn’t mean I’m not happy, it just means that I have done nothing but write for over a year.  At least I was productive–otherwise I would have done nothing at all.  When it gets to the point where you’re not answering the telephone and hiding in the house with the blinds drawn, you know you have to face up to the facts and be a responsible grown-up person, especially at your job. 

So here I am framing like crazy, and just like the work overload at Christmas, I’m working my way down through pictures that have piled over the months.  And just like at Christmas, I’ve gotten six glass cuts and two razor blade punctures so I’m wearing a few bandaids just to avoid getting blood on the work.  Two of the cuts were small and I was busy so I just sucked at them now and then.  Good thing too, because I haven’t been able to go inside the house for lunch.  Or other things. 

If I could only find an empty coffee can…

Even in the black of early morning, spring is told by chirps and calls that cut the stillness like a knife to split the seasons, and reveal a morning treat complete with daffodil frosting.

Uh-oh.  Gotta get my head screwed back on straight.  The next three weeks are going to be Hell Weeks.  Writing, editing, printing, sending deadlines are all on top of me at once.  It’s no wonder that I forgot to bring the car in for emissions testing, make a bank deposit, and put in my request to the Easter Bunny (is it really this weekend?).

Jim’s run out of underwear again, and I’ve been sending him to work wrinkled.  Really need to organize my time better, and write everything down with the absolute dates due so that something else doesn’t get overlooked.

And before the end of the year, I’m going to convert from Roman to Greek Catholic to have that extra week they get before holidays.

Boy, I fiddled with the screen settings on this laptop and quadrupled the vibrancy and clarity.  Now Spinning is a warmer, deeper, darker place to be–for me anyway.

I love it.

Big sister’s down in D.C., nervous because the surgeon mentioned cancer tests after my niece’s successful operation to drain an abscess off her brain.  But I think that’s only standard procedure, and they have to decide as well what antibiotics to put her one (it seems they hadn’t put her on any this past week!).

But as always, after crises our family thinks next of food.  My niece’s groggy request was for her mother’s chicken soup, nalesnicki (Polish crepes) and bulka.

That’s always a good sign, so I raced to e-mail her the traditional recipes, although sometimes I think that we could make them in our sleep.   

A snowy winter, and an unusally cold one.  Yet the birds know that tomorrow’s Spring.  They’re building nests, and all is gone from Jim’s last haircut that I dusted out the back door; I’m sure it has been used as choice soft insulation by the sharp-eyed robin or perhaps the tiny titmouse couple in the hedge.  I wonder what they think, though, when the large white flakes are flying, and the nights are long and cold.