Daffodils......

I love the sunshine!  I really missed it during the snow days we had the last few weeks! I missed taking my daily walk in my mud boots with Miss Kate by my side.  Not much to see in the winter but I'm always checking the status of my daffodils and Miss Kate loves anything I do with her.  Dogs are like that...doesn't matter if I'm just digging in the garden, she likes having me with her.  I have fallen hard for this silly dog.....didn't see that one coming!

I've been out stalking the daffodils and guess what?  Some of them have made an appearance!  Yep, one week after we hit record lows, I have sweet little daffodils peeking up through the ground!  Sunshine and my first peek of daffodils in the same day....this is a good day!

Daffodils are pretty hardy little flowers.  They are sunny, bright yellow little flowers that store it's energy from last summer and lay underground all during all the hottest part of the summer.  They put on quite a show but it's short-lived and many times, in Oklahoma, is cut way too short by an ice or snow storm or a powerful thunderstorm.  That doesn't bother those resilient flowers, they store more energy and try it again next spring.  I think as I've gotten older, I've become a little more daffodil than I used to be.  When I get knocked down, I get back up again and try over.  Age seems to bring a resiliency that I didn't have when I was young.

I've lived long enough to know it won't always be easy, that things are going to turn bad eventually and how I respond will matter more than what happens.  That things will turn good eventually.  That success sometimes means walking away from the thing you thought you wanted more than anything.  That some people are the sum of what you see, there is nothing else to them.  That real friends can not talk for months, even years, and then take right back up where they left off.  That being a daffodil is better than being a rose.......

Playing Hookie! Don't tell!

Today, my son and I are going to play hookie in the afternoon!  I'm planning to pack a picnic lunch and take him to the nature preserve at our local university to hike and look at nature.  I can't help it, the weather man just said it will be almost seventy degrees by four o'clock! 

On a day like today when I was back in college in the eighties, my friends and I would do the morning classes and then sneak out after lunch to don our bikinis and lay out on the roof of one of the dorms.  I had a friend who's window looked out over a vast expanse of black tar roof!  Now, in the summer, one did not dare set foot out that window for fear of literally frying, but in january and february it was the best place to lay out under the sun! He! He!

We would slather ourselves with a combination of baby oil and iodine, a secret recipe from one of the girls grandmothers, that would dye our skin so even if we didn't really get tan, we thought we did.   Then, with beach towels, drinks and snacks, sunglasses and of course, a boom box, four or five of us would bare our winter bods to the sun! What a glorious day it was!  That rare winter treat in Oklahoma of a seventy degree day! Of course, that was before any of us worried about wrinkles or skin cancer.  It was such a carefree time!

One more reason to love living in the middle of the united states! So you see why I can't stay inside, I just can't!  I have to get out and make some vitamin D!  I have to get my happy vitamin to last me until March because that mean, old weatherman also said by Monday or Tuesday of next week, we'll probably have another winter storm with highs around twenty-five to thirty degrees.

Where I grew up, we had a saying, 'make hay while the sun shines.' That means 'get while the gettin's good.'  Get out in the sunshine and great weather because, in Oklahoma, it may be gone!  Well, I'm planning on getting it today!  So if you call or come by my house this afternoon, you'll just have to sit on the back porch and talk to Kate until I get home!