The Many Signs of Spring

I get invigorated when Spring arrives every year, and this year is no different. Or I should say it was not different until about five minutes ago when I realized there is a bird that sounds like a car alarm, and his favorite place to sit is apparently in the tree right outside of my bedroom window. Maybe it has been winter too long and I forgot what birds sound like; Are they usually obnoxious and repetitive? Or is that really just somebody’s car alarm? Either way I am glad the sun is shining and the birds, bees and plants are back in bloom. No, it is definitely a bird. And it is making it really hard to concentrate on writing.

Spring also allows me to do the big deep clean of my things, such as the BB gun I just dusted off from the basement to address the aforementioned bird. It feels good to start fresh, like wearing a brand-new pair of jorts. This joke seems extremely random, but in fact I made myself a pair of very short jorts (jean shorts for anyone who has been lucky enough never to experience them before.) My intention was to make my wife laugh when she came downstairs and I was cooking dinner in ungodly jorts. Instead, my four-year-old daughter came downstairs first and asked why I was wearing them. This was a surprisingly hard conversation to have, and I honestly hope it is not her first long-term memory. But here is the reality: I am writing this blog post while wearing the same jorts. And I am not embarrassed. Just like my hero Larry Bird was not embarrassed when he wore them frequently on national TV.

Now that I have lost half of the people reading this, I can tell the other 3 of you that I had an epiphany today (unrelated to jorts.) All through the fall and winter seasons our first-floor bathroom had a giant empty planter sitting in it.

While it is beautiful and antique, always in the back of my head I dwell on its emptiness. My wife is an interior designer (we own our own business now!) and she has an amazing eye and an undeniable talent for design. However, as the saying goes “the cobbler’s children have no shoes.” I think a cobbler makes shoes. Do people say that? The problem I have is that my writing does not involve a lot of research, even if it is as simple as popping over to a web browser and searching “what is a cobbler?” My point is, my wife is so busy making everyone else’s homes look amazing that she sometimes forgets about picking a plant for our planter for 6 months (and counting.)

People might criticize my criticism, but I have tried multiple times to give input. We tried a beautiful olive tree that I bought for her, but it was so big that I felt like I was taking a dump in a tree. Because I was.

Then thankfully it started to die for lack of adequate sunlight (or exposure to the aforementioned dumps) and we moved the tree to a better home in her office. And that started the 6 months(and counting) of the planter sitting empty. I recommended we find a super-realistic fake tree because of the sunlight issue (that is, while the room gets a lot of sun when the curtains are up, it is a bathroom that looks straight into my neighbor’s kitchen, so for their sake the curtains are not ever up.) I thought a realistic fake tree was a good idea, which is why I said it about once a month for 6 months (and counting). This is where the epiphany came; maybe there is no such thing as a super-realistic, interior design-worthy fake tree!

I had the Good Idea to make a super realistic fake tree, where the leaves would have three layers: one for spring and summer, one for fall and one for winter. See the professional mock up below:

This way, when the leaves outside change colors it would prompt you to change your leaves, fooling everyone! If you wanted even more realism, we could offer one with leaves that were attached by Velcro that you would pull off and put all over the floor, like the real trees do. Come to think of it, the winter leaves have snow on them and that’s not very realistic since it does not snow inside most houses; Only houses like ours from 1905 with the original windows, because my wife thought they were gorgeous. Even though they do not work.

For now, the planter will remain empty until some engineer at Bed Bath and Beyond uses my idea to make a super-realistic fake tree. And people who visit our home will only know Spring has turned to Summer when I turn in my jorts for a shiny new Speedo.