*The first line of Robert Frost’s Nothing Gold Can Stay. A (long) aside: I took Advanced Placement English and Composition as a high school senior. By the time the AP exam rolled around I was ready to analyze the crap out of dozens of novels or any passage the testers wanted to throw my way. The College Board instead asked us to write some sort of essay on our choice of poem. I don’t remember the prompt, but I do remember it was imperative that you knew whatever poem you chose to write about by heart. I was not ready for that curveball, and the only poems I could remember verbatim under the pressure were three selections by Robert Frost: The Road Less Taken, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening and Nothing Gold Can Stay. I went for Nothing Gold Can Stay as I thought it was the least obvious of the three and got a 3 out of 5 on the exam, which is the lowest passing grade. It wasn’t enough to get me out of freshman composition in college, a class I slept through, threw together papers for 30 minutes before the class and passed with flying colors.

Work has kicked me in the ass lately and is the cause of my absence here (isn’t it always?) Not much to write about when all you think about is work and you’ve only had one day completely off from work in three weeks. The Modern Mom came to visit this past weekend, and I hardly saw her. I know she understands what I’m dealing with, but I feel incredibly guilty for not getting to spend time with her, which makes me hate my job even more than I usually do when I’m this busy.

Sometime in these past three weeks, spring showed up. It’s about two or three weeks ahead of schedule, though after a week of high 70s, things are a little more in line with where they should be this week with 50s and stormy weather.

One really happy discovery in the midst of all the sucktitude was that the tree in the backyard blooms. I never saw it during the spring last year since we hadn’t moved in yet, and I didn’t think too hard about what kind of tree it might be other than a nice, appropriately sized one for our yard. Well, lo and behold, it’s a dogwood tree.

Dogwoods make me happy. The elementary school I attended and loved as a kid was named Dogwood, and there were dogwoods planted on the grounds. The Girl Scout troop I was a member of had a dogwood crest. One of the biggest events in Knoxville, our current hometown, is the Dogwood Arts Festival, which includes tours of the beautiful ‘dogwood trails,’ or neighborhoods stocked to the brim with old dogwood trees. We’re not on a dogwood trail, but I daresay our tree rivals any you’d find on one of the trails.

I adore tending to flower beds, but haven’t had a chance to do much work since we moved in. By the time we were settled, it was July and too hot to plant anything. The only thing I got in the ground were some daffodil bulbs. I grabbed a package of bulbs from the Home Depot in September that claimed to be the earliest bloomers. They obliged by peeking through in February and blooming at the beginning of March. They’re starting to die now, but I’ll forgive them since so many other things are blooming.