Buddies...

Dear Maria,

To the point, wet and green and the usual birds about at the feeder and many flowers blooming and nearly Christmas. Ground drenched, and grass green but not growing. Knockouts still may be showing come January 1, but not so sure about the lantana. Azalea and tea olive blooming. Pyracantha heavy with red berries. Now only need Cloudless Sulphur butterflies chasing about and then we would be nearly seasonally unadjusted.

Truthfully, I have not seen the butterflies at the lantana since before Thanksgiving—you know the ones, paper-thin, pale green-yellow, flitting about. I nearly always see a pair and sometimes as many as five. They seem awfully aggressive with one another for such fragile looking things.

Their flight looks like they are out of control, but they have a good turn of speed that also belies their delicate looking wings. Often I will see two hang about for ten minutes or more, which must be a long stretch in butterfly time. Of course, given where some migrate to, that may not be so. During the season they are as regular as daylight coming and going.

Two boys in the neighborhood—catching the middle school bus this year—set another marker for the ebb and flow of days. For nearly 5 years, I have watched them—traveling in both directions—either to the bus or from the bus. One on a bike, or both. Basketball in the mix or, and very rarely, a football tossed between them.

They push, they dare, they laugh, they chase. Perhaps they will be the ones at the end of their senior year to marvel at how much of their lives have been spent on this wedge of the world. They live but a block and a half apart and so can get into each other’s back pocket easily.

In the winter darkness, they are headed home at seven—I can hear the ball being pounded into the pavement. Summer nights, they are out until nine. Sometimes others follow as satellites to these joined-at-the-hip sons of the neighborhood.

I am glad for their coming and going. Returns me—in my mind—to running my neighborhoods with my best friend, and the unofficial gang, the incessant games, the occasional dustups, the firm footing for anchoring our young selves.

For some reason, I think this kind of kid-hood in our brave new world is disappeared, but here, at least, it is not so. I find it heartening.

But then, don’t we still have our buddies—sounds so old-fashioned, but it is true. Especially those separated from us in time and space, and yet not. In that spirit I wish you a very happy holiday season to be spent with family and friends.

And here's to 2016.

Yours, fondly, warmly, srk