What If I Said Yes?

I let errands pile up until I have four or five, then drive to town to do them, and yesterday, as the snows melted in the February sun, came an impulse to pick up a takeout salad. Oh, man, how I fought with myself, turning in the direction of the place, then turning away, then turning the car around and back because I could make salad at home. I shouldn't spend the money, because when I'm old and shivering I'll wish I'd saved it . . . But gosh, I can't ever treat myself? And the portions are big enough to make two meals . . . I overthought a Chicken Caesar salad. I wanted it all readymade, with potato chips and a cookie. It's been months since I've had a bag of chips or an oversized greasy coffeehouse cookie.

Thus they were made manifest, bagged, and passed to me through an open window and as the day neared noon and 60 degrees -- a full 60 degrees warmer than the previous week -- I thought it ideal for the year's first picnic. I added a plate of sliced apple and a beer. (Beer: It's not just for breakfast anymore!) My in-laws always know when they visit to bring a case of Wisconsin beer, and because they visit twice a year at most and less so this year, I hoard my beers for special occasions, like the first day of 2021 warm enough for porch dining.

Salud! Then I had a nap.

First Picnic of the Year

Humble meal: leftover cabbage curry with yogurt; mandarin orange; bottled water. Awful if I would have had to eat it in the car, but  this checkered weather (one day gray, next day brilliant; typical March) delivered today a wonderful sun-filled 70-degree experience, and into the city park I went, the only picnicker around, and enjoyed my lunch and looked forward to all the picnics of 2015. Okay, I admit I was looking for mushrooms too.

Sole Picnic

On my screened porch, on a brawny picnic table built on the spot because assembled it wouldn't fit through either door, is where I serve most summer meals, but another picnic table, much older, waits patiently in the shade beneath the twin giant oaks, its paint pummeled off by at least 15 years of rain and snow, its joints rotting. About every other year I nail, C-clamp, or wood-screw its raggedy pieces together, hoping it will last one more year as a buffet table or a stand for my cast-iron grill. But this summer I hadn't hosted a buffet nor had I grilled. Patient as ever, the shabby eyesore looked appealingly toward me each day while I refused to consider risking splinters, wasps, or the ticks and chiggers teeming in the taller grass around it, but most of the time it was beneath my notice.

Today was the day, a perfect September day, about 78 degrees, sunny, with cotton-ball clouds in a vivid sky, the grass recently cut; and almost everything is still so intensely green I thought, "The earth is covered with plants."(A marvelous fact.) As I gazed at the decrepit picnic table I suddenly understood it, and loved it, and set my dinner out there: a bowl of jambalaya, a flaxseed wrap, and a beer.

Usually I picnic in the open air away from home, doing it a pleasant number of times during this mild summer, but today I woke again to how amazing it is that I can cross the lane, sit down, picnic in my own Missouri yard right in the mainstream flow of life, "bugged" only by a very small wasp which drowned in the jambalaya.

The planks in the grass are the last surviving pieces of a cold frame Demetrius built in 2002.