Two 3.8-mile city rides, the lilacs nearly over. Tomorrow night is the Botanic Garden's plant sale, and I might go just to spend some time amongst the several varieties of lilacs.
The other day I used the word "spatch" for perhaps the first time in this site. I deplore my underuse of this invention. It's a spot or patch of territory you claim for your own. If it's not at your house, it could be just Yours anyway, like the bit against the slopey rock on East Beach across from my dorm Holcomb, or under the little sapling outside the first Denver apartment, or under the one particular linden tree on the plaza outside Dot Org's previous building, or the one bit of grass on the concave side of the parapet enclosing the patio at the new building. At Formigny, the reading spatch is in the backyard in the shade of the neighbor's tree.
Spatch. It makes your mouth happy. It makes your butt and your book happy to have a favorite place to read with a name to it.
This one ranks with her comment to me when I was in high school and newly disdainful about her preference for elevator music, predicated by a Muzak version of, say, "Let It Be" assaulting my ears and my asking her, respectfully I am so sure, why not listen to the original versions of songs. She said, "How do you know my music didn't come first?"
My mother called Saturday while we were in the garden. I didn't call her back during the weekend, so by Tuesday evening when she called again she was worried. I called her Wednesday morning over breakfast, apologized for not returning her call over the weekend, and explained that we had been at the opera yestreen (another underused word, though not my invention). She asked how that was and I commented about not liking opera before, maybe because before was Puccini but now was Mozart and she said,
"But you liked 'Phantom of the Opera.'"
That campaign I'm to be no more sarcastic to her than I can help? Severely strained.