Into Summer

It's warm out every day now, and the Smith family of Clover Park Drive is preparing for summer. My first full season with Symphoria wrapped up, and I've been offered the job for another year. There was a big Beethoven 9 show in April, and for the first time all season I walked from the parking garage to the hall in sunny/pleasant weather. All year long that walk had been through whipping winds and slush and brown snow mountains. I hardly knew what to think as we walked through a beautiful downtown Syracuse. There was a "highbrow" movie show after that, and then a much more enjoyable "lowbrow" movie music pops show.

The first week after the end of Symphoria was gloriously blank, but BPO called as I was wrapping up the pops concerts with an offer to play one of their pops shows. And then a donor concert. And then a classics week. And then the contemporary music week. And that's how my "low-key" June turned into working in Buffalo all month. But that's been great--there's a lot of money coming in, and both new cars have been (knock-knock) free from trouble. I continue to spend lots of quality time with I-90.

J is beginning to show a bit of baby bump. She's very cute. It's been encouraging to see everyone's reaction to the news, and I know that she loves being pregnant. She's more keen on an afternoon nap nowadays, but otherwise she's keeping up the same pace to her days. She teaches at a local Christian school on Wednesday mornings, Hochstein on Wednesday nights, and then does church work from Thursday through Sunday. She played a quintet recital last week, and James sat through the whole thing without a peep. Just as we've got the one child trained to attend concerts, we're going to need to break in another!

James lives for the spish-spish. He wants to be outside all the time, and his favorite place to be is roaming up and down the near side of the automated car wash. At this point most of the employees--college aged boys in bow-ties, starched blue shirts, and sneakers--know him by name and wave to him. He mashes his face up against the windows and they'll occasionally spray at him with a hose. Once he watches the attendants hose off the car he dashes to the next window to watch it get soaped, then to the next window to watch the automatic dryer kick on, and then to the exit to watch the car drive out dripping and "all clean."

It's hot in our apartment most of the time, up on the second floor, and that's just fine so far. I practice in shorts and an undershirt, and slip on flip flops to take laundry or trash down to the basement. Adulthood is starting to get a bit easier. I say this with great caution and humility, but I think that now more often than not my laundry is done, my living quarters are clean, and the urgent items on my desk are taken care of.

There's still a lot up in the air, of course. We don't know where we'll live next fall, or where I'll work the fall after that. We don't know if we're in upstate New York to stay, or just until the next audition. But we have lots of good food in the fridge, two working vehicles, a little boy who chatters our ear off, and three potted plants on the table. We have the greatest supermarket in the world down the street, a perfectly manicured courtyard lawn, and three big trees outside the window. We have temperatures in the 70s and the 80s for the next week, and a chance to be out in it as a family. Summer is here, and it is good.