How lovely to fight solar glare at drop-off today!  It’s a real circus, drop-off is.  Students coming and going, lugging backpacks, strutting their uggs (girls), nearly losing their pants (boys), drivers pausing, then not pausing, inserting themselves, waiting, then not waiting, the U driveway, the crosswalks, the parking lots, left and right — it’s a big ole mess, and not the least bit so because many behind the wheel are brand new drivers (and teenagers, to boot).  So, when you add blinding sun, it is always a cause for caution and concern.

But, today I said, “Yippee”, because who can’t use a little sun at this point?!

Raking recently, I made an interesting find.  Not a soccer ball or hockey puck — though I find plenty of those.  In fact, I have long maintained that the thing I grow best are balls (GET YOUR MIND OUT OF THE GUTTER).  I refer, here, not to my male progeny, or my own lizard brain’s tendency toward aggression, but to the propensity for all manner of recreational balls to land in my perennial beds.  Baseballs and whiffle balls from my baseball-crazy neighbor, soccer balls from my boys and two kitty-corner neighbors, kick balls that crossed two fences from the schoolyard behind us, tennis balls from god-knows-where, and lacrosse balls, which can be blue, yellow, or white.

And, as trees have ‘drip zones’, I have long been aware that D.’s second-story window has a ‘launch zone’, in which I am STILL uncovering various objects like Playmobil pirates, Legos, and things so wrapped in duct tape I have no idea what they are.

But, imagine my surprise when I unearthed C.’s missing RETAINER in the beds by the driveway!!!  It has since been replaced (at a cost I won’t reveal because I don’t want to lose my breakfast), but nevertheless, it truly felt like the boys’-toy-garden-turned-treasure-trove and surely will go down in family lore, along with the story of K.’s father going through reams of garbage to find HIS lost retainer some 40 years ago.