Croak is what they do

In just a matter of about a week the daytime temperatures have risen by an average of about 30 degrees or more. It was 65 and sunny yesterday. Today promises even warmer temperatures. On the way from errands in Barre yesterday afternoon, we observed folks in tank tops and shorts. It’s still a little nippy to don that attire for me, but jackets are definitely jettisoned and the warmth is like a long lost lover’s caress. You might say Eric and I have been having a threesome with Mother Nature here at the Clearing. Woo-hoo!

As we meandered home along scenic Route 2, past picturesque silos and barns, rolling meadows, a covered bridge, a blacksmith shop, houses alternating between sweetly manicured capes and lonely, dilapidated, boarded-up shacks, I remarked to Eric that I had noticed that the crocuses we saw sprouting up and beginning to bloom in the front yard about two weeks ago, are gone without a trace. “Isn’t that sort of odd?” I asked. “You’d think they’d really be getting after it, now that spring seems to have officially made it’s entrance.” He asked if I thought perhaps something had eaten them—or maybe they had just bloomed, and then died.  Our conversation went something like this:

Eric: “Isn’t that what crocuses do?”
Me:   “Croak?”
Eric: “Crocus what they do. Get it?”
Me:   “Or, if they were, in fact, cut to the quick by some hungry critter, or blighted by one of those random snowfalls we had last week, maybe their name is just a command to nature:  ‘Croak us.'”
Eric:  “Either way…croak is what they did.”

We have these sorts of silly conversations all the time. I suppose we are equally (and easily) amused by each other. Maybe that is the key to our compatibility. My daughter Kylie says Eric and I have separation issues. Hmmm. When she was leaving for Thailand, she suggested I download “Family Map” to my phone, so I could keep track of her whereabouts. It was really fun. I told Eric maybe he and I should get Family Map. His response was a deadpan, “Why, Sweetie? We’re rarely more than twenty feet apart.” True. Who needs a Family Map app when we can just use the Hey-You’re-Right-Over-There app, without even having to download anything? We may sound overly-attached, but somehow, we love it this way. Does that make us weird? Dysfunctional? Crazy? (Don’t answer that.) A colleague of Eric’s recently remarked that the only couples who share an email address (which we do for work) are extremely elderly people who dress alike, and then it only shows up in their Christmas cards. Something like that. We thought about going out to the Tractor Supply store and buying matching Carhart overalls, flannel shirts and mud boots (or, on the other hand, how about matching, floral print spring dresses and heels?), grabbing a couple of chain saws, and getting a photo taken of us, American Gothic style, in front of our sweet little hideaway in the woods. We could send it to his colleague, AND include it in our Christmas cards.

Pretty little crocuses, before they…

…croaked.