It is truly spring!

It has been thirty days since my last post. I have been missing, absent, truant, gone, from the blogosphere. Thank you to those who have noticed and have urged me to get back on the keyboard. It has been a month of adapting to an exciting and flexible retirement schedule filled with activities and challenges. Someone wrote that retirement was the appetizer part of life because you get to pick and choose what you like. My experience so far is that it is more like an all you can eat buffet with a vast variety of dishes. Each dish is filling and nutritious. In these past four weeks I have spent quality time with each grandchild visiting museums and libraries, playing in the park, and listening to their laughter. I am taking three classes through the Academy for Learning in Retirement and have traveled by train to Niagara Falls, Canada with John, my son's adult transition group. We have also attended a Billy Joel Concert and a Wierd Al Yankovich performance and the musical, The Putnam County Spelling Bee. There has also been the smaller but no less sweeter joys of cleaning house, cooking dinner, paying bills, having dinner with friends and planting the garden. All new activities to me in this post-work world I am experiencing. Similar to the all you can eat buffet, I am tempted to over indulge and consume more then is healthy. I am learning to pick and choose activities and opportunities with more care.

The icing on the cake has been the arrival of Spring. The sign we look for in our household is the blooming of our flowering crab apple tree. This morning it greeted us with a magnificent display of pink flowers. My thoughts turned to this prayer by Ted Loder titled; Be With Me in My Unfolding.

It is spring, Lord, and the land is coming up green again,

unfolding outside my well-drawn boundaries and urgent schedules.

And there is the mystery and the smile of it.

The willows are dripping honey color into the rivers,

and the mother birds are busy in manger nests,

and I am learning again that

"for everything there is a season

and a time for every matter under heaven."

O Lord, you have sketched the lines of spring.

Be with me in my unfolding.