Wednesday

The peepers are singing and the growing moon is high in the sky. I believe that the moon will be full early next week on Passover.

The stream is still noisy and the garden site quite flooded.

What a relief!

I am not ready to plant the garden and have a very good excuse since we can't even get out there yet.

The boys pulled down an old falling down fence for me and the girls spent some time with our dear friend Dawn. I went to Lowe's to pick up a few supplies for our work day coming up Saturday and visited with a friend. Picked up our car from Pinckerton Chevrolet. They gave me new tires and changed the oil and fixed lots of little broken things. It looks like a new vehicle!

On the way home I put in one of Philip's new cd's, a collection of Gram Parson's songs. I am more of an Emmylou Harris fan, but greatly appreciate Gram, especially since I have heard Philip sing a version of many of those songs our whole marriage. Only last month did I first hear "The Streets of Baltimore" by anyone other than Philip. He would sing that song every time someone would mention Baltimore, remembering his one and only college year spent there. We would laugh as he got to the part about the wife wanting to "walk the streets of Baltimore." Or if he was cleaning up the fireplace he would sing about "Sweeping the Ashes out in the morning." Not exactly great Christian living music, but it had soul and made us laugh as he would belt out the verses. Every single one of them.

Philip had a song for every circumstance in life. He listened to country music in northern NJ when country music wasn't cool. Or good. Country music in the 70's is pretty corny, but those lyrics were certainly memorable to Philip, and now to us after hearing them for 18 years. I thought it was a sign of God's sense of humor that I would grow up in Oklahoma and Texas in the country on a farm and Philip would grow up in a world far away, but still know the songs of my culture. That music was part of what drew Philip to desire to live on a farm someday.

As I listened to Gram wail on Still Feeling Blue, I smiled, thinking about how bizarrely pertinent those lyrics were to me, as Philip had to go, and I have never felt so low, and I can't help but wonder why he had to go. I KNOW he is happy now, doing up the celestial town, cause he sure knows how!

It felt good to smile and sing along to Philip's lyrics. I mean Gram's. Guess I will have to download Streets of Baltimore to my ITunes library. But I'm not sure about sweeping out the ashes.