Autumnal ponderings....

Getting old seems t’be the only available way to live a long life.

Winter’s coming early this year....Well, that’s what the ubiquitous ‘they’ say anyway....in a normal year (whatever that is) winter comes strolling into northern California in the first part of November having already flexed them winter muscles in a couple different places...

sometimes it comes in quiet ‘n sneaky ‘n sometimes it does one of those Pearl Harbor sneak attacks...this year seems t’be one ‘a those tentative feel its way into the neighborhood kind of fall....just a little early...the gutters haven’t been cleaned out yet, the patio umbrella is still up protecting that beat-up old lawn furniture from the sun that ain’t there at the moment...I still have a lawnmower sitting idle in the side yard almost covered by the sycamore leaves that have been piling up for a couple weeks now...

I know, I could’a cleaned all that up on a daily basis but I didn’t....I never do really since one of the things that I hate t’do is yard work...maybe that’s kind’a strong...I don’t know that I actually ‘hate’ work...it never did really bother me much ‘n I tried hard not to bother it much...it ain’t so much that I’m lazy, it’s just that I tend t’be on the trifling side....

Back when I was a boy, back in that once upon a time daze of halcyon youth, people didn’t, for the most part, have large lawns ‘cause they had to cut the grass their own selves ‘n nobody had power mowers...

well, most families had mowers powered by teenage sons ‘n they’re notoriously famous for malfunctioning in the middle of the job ‘n I wudn’t any different...I hated mowing the durn grass...My dad liked lawns however but that was mainly ‘cause he’d look at it ‘n say t’me that “the grass needs cutting” and I wuz the one that wuz s’pozed to jump out there with a big smile on my face ‘n push that darn mower ‘round ‘n ‘round...I’ll tellya true, I still hate cutting that darn grass ‘n when I c’n avoid it, I do so.....

Anyways, winter is coming on ‘n I need to pull the lawnmower into the basement ‘n store away the patio umbrella ‘n I ought’a throw away the durn lawn furniture...I need to keep the rakes handy ‘n I don’t want to get too awful far from my handy dandy electric leaf blower (it’s kind’a comforting to have it close to hand)....

Ah, it’s gonna rain.....ain’t really seen any rain here since last April or maybe it was sometime in May...I forget which...

“The laziest man I ever met put popcorn in his pancakes so they’d turn over by themselves.” W. C. Fields