9 a.m.

It’s the 23rd, oh no, I haven’t mailed Mom’s birthday card yet! She turns 63 on the 28th and the card has to make it to Salmon Arm, B.C., by then. This means a trip to town is necessary today.

Everett spent hours, a veritable Scrooge, counting and rolling coins. Now he wants to go to the bank. I’ve convinced him to buy a couple savings bonds with money he’s saved up from gifts, so if they’re still available we’ll do that while we’re running our errands. Man it’s hard to explain to an 11-year-old how interest, and then compound interest, works.

A crow’s raucous call drifted down from the sky yesterday afternoon while we were out walking. What a welcome sound. Soon it will be the discordant cacophony of huge flocks of Canada geese migrating north again. I can hardly wait.

I want to buy fresh cream from the neighbour, who milks a Jersey cow, so Scott and I stopped in there Sunday afternoon to ask if she had any. She didn’t, as the cow is about to calf, but she dug into a deep freeze in their porch and handed me three pounds of homemade butter and two large bags of cottage cheese. It was a generous parting gift, as she refused payment for it.

Fresh cream reminds me of Grandpa, of course. He loved cream. His idea of a treat was to pour the thick liquid over a slice of white bread and then sprinkle sugar on top and eat it with a spoon. Ee-oo, I would think, how can you eat that? But it had been a dessert in their home (my great-grandparents were born in Norway) when he was a boy, and he ate it with gusto.

It’s coming up to seven years that he’s been gone. And still, irrational as it may be, I’m pissed off that he had to go and that the only way to see him now is in the occasional and rare dream.

Well, in spite of my efforts, I can’t convince Everett to make me some scrambled eggs and toast for breakfast. So I’d best get off my lump and funnel some food in my stomach’s direction.