This afternoon Josh will strut out of his high school classrooms as a student for the last time. After running in the regional track meet in Emporia tomorrow night (and the state meet if he does well), he will end his high school years Sunday afternoon at the graduation ceremony.

His local grandmothers are atwitter, and the paternal grandparents are driving up from Houston as I type. Mom and Dad will spend the night in Oklahoma and arrive here Friday afternoon in time to board the kid-hauler for a ninety-minute drive to Emporia where for the first time they will watch Joshua compete. There's much to be written about graduation time, but these events are still upon me, and writing about being in the middle of things from the vantage point of the middle of things is beyond me at the moment, so this will be brief.

I need time to reflect if I hope to do more than simply marvel at how quickly these eighteen years have slipped past me. His graduation is a rite of passage not only for him, but for his parents and probably his younger brothers as well. In the meantime, however, I must attend to the routine chores that accompany the end of another cycle of classes at school, while simultaneously whipping this place into shape for guests, an endless chore. Have I written about anything else lately? And have I made it clear that this cleaning panic has a locus of control extrinsic to me? As soon as I think we've got the house together, the grass grows, milk scum hardens in glasses, a lone dirty sock lands in a candy bowl while its partner dangles in a rubber plant, a happy meal toy finds its way out from under the fridge, and dust accumulates apace on the paddles of the ceiling fans -- well, it's a familiar scenario, I suppose, when in-laws are expected and young boys are allowed to live, breathe, and have their being indoors.

Okay, for the next three days, nobody changes underwear, understand!?!?

No, not you. (The air-conditioning guy is here making sure we're ready for the summer and for my parents, whose tolerance for heat and cold ranges from 69 to 70 degrees Fahrenheit.)

I have also been working on a piece about my brother's funeral for Memorial Day that I had hoped to post by the end of the month. I do not, however, expect it to see the light of the Internet this year. Although the calendar tells me I'm well out of the middle of that season of loss (in fifteen days I'll mark the thirteenth year since his death), I'm not recognizably closer to leaving it behind if my inability to write or speak about it lucidly and tearlessly is any indication. The compulsion to get the writing of it exactly right still binds me, perhaps because I think I did not get the living of it right enough, and that, my friend, might prevent the appearance of that writing in even abbreviated form.

Add to this physical and emotional commotion a task I took on with little notice. On Monday, the local senior center where I occasionally volunteer to teach computer classes asked if I'd be willing to put together a set of web pages for them. I had plenty of photos of folks from the center, they had no where else to turn, and they offered the princely sum of $250 American, so I agreed. And oh, by the way, we'd like to have that by Friday for a board meeting. Is that okay?

By spending a few late nights on the project, I managed to make the pages presentable, lacking only a promised page of local links that I'll complete after this weekend's excitement. After the center approves the pages at a meeting tomorrow at noon, and after I have uploaded the pages to a home of some kind, I'll link to them from my journal. Because I had so little notice, I took the cookie-cutter approach, adapting these journal pages to the center's proposed organization. The pages I made for them display the usual flaw of amateur web pages -- too many links, not enough content -- but that will change as they begin to include more of their own photos and stories of their activities.

So, the last few days have been busy ones for this household, and that is the way I need May to be. There is much more to say about zebras and horses, about snow flakes and cottonwood fluffies, and about hearing Louis Armstrong croon "It's a Wonderful World" (but maybe that's a lyric and not the title) through the hum of the mighty Metro's tires, but those things must wait for a few days while the life gets lived and the white socks get sorted. And just who the hell melted blue crayon on this 100-watt lightbulb?

I wonder if a 60-watter would have worked as well.

The iris linger, the roses bloom, and headstone-decorating ladies fret that hail will knock the petals from their peonies before Memorial Day.