My 15-year-old son is still bringing me flowers. He dug up the tiny vase (it belonged to Aunt Jean) and set it on my desk in the morning before I got to the computer. Too bad I can't get him to clean off the desk for me; it's in a bad way and due for a scrubbing. It gets this way periodically and I just keep placing pile on top of pile until they're falling over and there's no room for one more piece of paper. Finally I can't stand it anymore and spend a half-hour organizing and dusting everything.

My other son, who turns 20 next Saturday, asked me the other day, "Mom, am I going to be a dad someday?"

Now there's a tough question. Would Emil be able to care for a child? I don't think so. We had a talk about it, but he wasn't interested in a long drawn-out conversation. I think he just wanted to know whether fatherhood was inevitable.

We will, however, have to approach the subject again with an eye to birth control. This is not as simple as it may sound, because Emil, though I believe he has the normal physical desires of someone his age, does not have the intellectual comprehension of your average young man. So it will be like teaching sex education to a six-year-old. I don't really know how to go about it. Hm. Maybe I'll wait till I've sat down for my annual meeting with his special needs teacher in a week or two, and see what she has for ideas.

***

Scott has been working over at Golden Grain Farm this week. He has wired-in a light (at my request) over the kitchen sink and finished off a kitchen cabinet that he amputated (at his insistence), removing a lazy susan that didn't turn and replacing it with usable shelving. He finished up with some sanding, hole-filling, glueing and whatnot, all time-consuming with nothing obvious to show for it. I'll go over today and clean up after him. Least I can do.

With the rain, there is now water coming into the basement over there. Which means the water table is high. Which means we can't dig around the foundation and put in weeping tile right away, because the hole will just fill with water. He's gone to town to find the right kind of pump to put in a hole in the basement floor. All I can say is, I am glad he knows what needs to be done. If it was me by myself, I probably wouldn't even realize any action was necessary. Till the banks were overflowing ....

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In other news—and this may be no big deal to some, but for me it's a breakthrough—in my garden digging this spring I have picked up three earthworms and moved them to safety, without gloves on. Yes! What is happening to me? I still get the weebie-jeebies at the thought of touching one that is squished, but was surprised to find myself actually picking up these moist creatures in my bare hands! And okay, I admit it, I talked to them while moving them to safety.

Me and the earthworm gods, we got a thing going on.