Margie, conducting petals

We’ve had every weather today: hail, torrential rain, sun, mist, rainbows, and glowering clouds. While I was with Margie this afternoon the rain stopped briefly and we went out for a walk. I steered her toward a row of blossoming apple trees just as a wind came up and released a flutter of petals. Margie waved her right hand as if conducting the choreography of the petals. In case you doubt her delight, see Extra.

“Who could ever turn down spring?” she asked dreamily.

Her sons arrive tomorrow for a short visit, and she is all aflutter with excitement. “They are such wonderful boys, and they love Lucy for all she does for me. How old are my boys, do you remember?”

I said they’re in their 70s. She was stunned. Impossible, she thought. And then she laughed.

I’ve posted this in other years, but here is my favorite spring song. Again.

Yesterday Sue accompanied her friend Ellen to the swimming pool at the Mittleman Jewish Community Center, and while they were taking an AquaYoga class, there was a “credible threat” of a shooter. Everyone was ordered to wait in the dressing rooms while police and FBI searched the building with machine guns pointed and at the ready. Chilling. Fortunately it all turned out to be a hoax, but Sue and Ellen made the TV News. (They’re in the second of three really poor photographs.) Photojournalism seems to me to have reached a low point in Portland.