Summer is finally here, not that that will make living any easier or cheaper. Memorial Day marks the semi-official beginning of summer where we trade our dress blues for our summer whites and our $3.00 a gallon fuel bill for our equally expensive air-conditioning bill. Here in New England we have a very short spring. That was it, last week. If you missed it you are not alone. It rained a 100 years flood and never got above 50 degrees during this years spring. Still the consensus among old time New Englanders, and now that I’m over 50 I can count myself among them, is that we’ve had an early spring. Yep it was about a week early and packed a little tighter. That means that the crocuses were up late but everything else was up early.
I got my garden in, well most of it. I’ve been living here about 5 years and I finally got a fence up around the raised beds I built last year. Pounded the stakes in three years ago. It took me 10 years to get the garden I liked in Belmont so I’m really not procrastinating. I haven’t touched the front yard yet or even thought about it much. I really don’t care what neighbors or drive-by’s think. It is an ugly house and there is very little I can do about it except hide the blemish that it is. That’s part of the reason I haven’t done anything about the curb appeal of the house. Friends of mine in Real Estate call it a “teardown.” Which is something I’d love to do were it not for the fact that I need a roof over my head. I’d have to borrow money to tear it town and even more to put it back up. The house I can afford as is, anything else and I might as well wish for one of the plastic coated mansions that are going up in the neighborhood and selling for nearly a million. In other words, “forgetaboutit.” When the tasteless developers run out of land to build their insipid mansions on and if there is still a supply of newly wealthy but culturally deprived homebuyers (and there seams to be an inexhaustible supply) then I may jazz the front up just enough to sell the crumbling ruin and retire to … where? Florida is to hot, Maine is too cold, Fiji, to far. Something to think about while I wait for the offer I can’t refuse.
