What has happened since I've been gone? Let me recount briefly.

Having come down on the side of practicality over panache, we replaced the '58 Chevy pickup with a used Ford Ranger for the use of the eldest son. The cost of the body work on the damaged Chevy was just too far beyond our need for style and too far beyond our budget, too.

I mediated a disagreement about payment to one of our fellowship members for a program that we thought she had volunteered to present. Not real successful, that effort -- we won't be hearing her, she won't have her desired audience. Oh well.

The sedum in the warm west yard poked its temporarily cabbage-like leaves through last year's stalks, bringing a small joy into spring as well as fall.

Fed by the heavy rains that fell this week in our unusually warm weather, the daffodils and tulips poked through the mulch, or rather through the leaves that escaped our final raking last fall. Forsythia is yet to bloom, but I'm betting it will this week.

Life among the Unitarians today provided a choral performance of "Deep River" for the first time, a spiritual with a wonderful melody that needs only some lyrics more appropriate to our godless congregation. And at the same meeting, Richard Pitts did a presentation on the underground railroad, complete with an authentic ball and chain as a most unspeakable but powerful illustration of his point.

There was a birthday dinner for the mother-in-law, complete with storebought flowers, candles, and chocolate chiffon pie. No pictures of the pie are available. Go figure.

But the flowers remain, and I offer them (good as new on their second day) to Catherine of Naked Eye, both for her extraordinarily generous comments in her web log on my own meager pages (which recognition I happily acknowledge as part of my fifteen minutes of fame), and for the wonderful writing she herself displays every day, but particularly in her February 26th entry. I suspect that Catherine knows that some weeks life is simple only if you squint.