Telling the Beads of the Spring Rosary

The watchword for today —  roses, roses, roses.  Twining up porch rails...espaliered against brick...tumbling over chainlink.

If spring were a teacup, right now roses would be spilling over its lip.  

So we're in the thick of things now; the thick of the spring.  Which means roses, and the frills of the irises, and a chorus of bird song before six in the morning.

We're in the thick of things now; the thick of the spring.  Which means a very full, maybe overfull dance card.  What did parents do before day planners?* Way back in those split-level ranch-style, suburban cul-de-sac days when kids rode bikes unattended while moms chatted over cocktails on the back patio (I know these days only from John Updike stories and Marilyn French's The Women's Room, so maybe they never existed?) did parents have to use lists and calendars to keep track of all their children's social and educational excursions? Not to mention all the meetings that we as parents are now expected to attend?  

The reason things get so complicated is that a lot of the things on our calendar for the next month or so are fun activities:  birthday parties, school field days, school picnics, recitals, art shows... and so on.  The difficulty lies in the fact that there are just so many of them!  

Which brings me to...

A couple of months ago, a blogging friend (a blog-friend? a friend I made via blogging and the internets) posted a call to arms regarding the overly-busy life of the modern family.

The problem with starting an intentional movement to slow things down (my friend is calling it the Slow Family Movement  — as in Slow Food Movement, not as in families that are witless, a cohort mine sometimes belongs to) is that the last thing you probably want to spend time on is holding meetings about it.  

But the idea of intentionally slowing things down is such a good one.  It deserves a manifesto, and bears thinking about, particularly during this particularly busy time of year.  

All that being said, I'm off to see what I might be able to excise from our dayplanner and to take a sip from the cup of spring.  

  

*my dayplanner calendar pages come from a company called Day Runner.  Is that kin to a rum runner, or to a 50-yard sprinter?