This has been the strangest February and March I've ever seen.  Temperatures going from freezing to 85 degrees nearly every week.  Up and down.  The redbuds began to bloom in February.   The redbuds never bloom here until my birthday--give or take a week.  Sunday was my birthday.  March 26.   I'm sure the peach blossoms froze and killed the peaches.  Strange, strange weather.

And I've already been busy in my yard for a month planting things.  I'm sure that it will freeze again and ruin what I have done, because this is Oklahoma.  If you don't like the weather, wait a minute.  But I get itchy to plant things when it is warm.

Today, my next door neighbor mowed my lawn.  It was up to my ankles and the lawn man (mower) doesn't ever come to mow until the first week in April.  When the grass is so bad that your neighbors come and mow your lawn, you know the growing season is really out of kilter.

However, I'm not complaining.  It just means more spring days as far as I am concerned.  Time to plant tomatoes.  And parsley and green peppers and basil.  Most of it doesn't live.  But I refuse to lose my optimism.  You can't predict in Oklahoma what is going to make it.  One year one thing survives, and the next year something else makes it.  But you can always count on okra.

I've always had good luck with asparagus--I don't eat much of it, but it's good to have something to give away to my neighbors--so I don't feel like a leech all the time.  Everyone around here is so good to me.  I am the "token widow" on the block.  Everyone takes care of me.  They know my kids have forbidden me to get on a ladder, so they even check to see if I'm being "Good."

It's hard to come to grips with the fact that I am considered to be "old."  I think about all the "old" people I have tried to help through the years and wonder if they considered themselves to be old.  I don't.  I'm the same person I've always been.  At least inside my head.   It's my body that is betraying me.  And yes, Sunday I was 79.  Good grief!  How can that be?  My head tells me I'm thirty-one.