After what seems like weeks of rain, it is finally drying up. My potted perennials all needed water. Hoses are the bane of my existence. I was sure I drained and coiled them perfectly in the late fall. Nevertheless, they became a tangled mess as I tried to set them up. I made a big contribution to the cuss bucket.

Like a crazy person, I picked up ten baby chicks at SBS. Hopefully, they will begin laying by August. My existing flock is rapidly becoming elderly and are only producing eggs intermittently. I always laugh when the news suggests that raising your own birds is the answer to rising egg prices. If I added up time, effort and $35 for 50 pounds of organic food, I probably spend $50 a dozen. Just saying!

There is so much spring breaking out all over the Island. I noticed the pastures at Nip and Tuck Farm are particularly green. I guess that’s what decades of horses and cows do to a field. While traveling along Music street, I stopped for a “traffic jam” of dozens of male turkeys. They were in the street putting on their best effort to attract girlfriends.

While on bird news, I lingered in the Vineyard Haven Post Office parking lot listening to the Vineyard’s own Cynthia Riggs on NPR’s Moth radio show tell her story of her romance with Howie. A crow was eating a doughnut next to me. He kept flying pieces of it up to the roof to feed (I presume a lady friend).

My motto this late in life is: Live and rarely — if ever — learn. Some years ago, I started some potatoes in the greenhouse. When they came up, I hauled the large pot outside, where they promptly froze. This year, I ordered some actual seeds for a Clancy variety. Remarkably, they came right up in the seed tray. I painstakingly separated the baby plants and watched over them for several weeks. Clearly, I forgot their vulnerability and put them outside. You must see where this is headed? Last week’s wind and freeze wiped them out. Sigh!

In other and better news, I am still enjoying the fruits of last year’s garden labors. I ate the last of the butternut squash on Monday. It was still firm and delicious after months on the counter.

When I moved to the property some 50 years ago, there was a sad, crooked little apple tree. A pitch pine had overpowered it. We cut the pine and did some major repair on the poor thing. Last year, it yielded enough apples to make several canner loads of sauce.

I opened one for breakfast on Tuesday and topped it with a dollop of marscapone. Life might not be better than this. It’s a good thing I can still enjoy my life since there is quite a bit of scary situations in the world.

I wonder if I’m outraged or terrified that I live in a country where the government can round up other human beings with no due process and ship them off to a notorious prison in El Salvador. Didn’t the concept of due process come down to us from 1215 in the Magna Carta?

At Easter time in 1980, a right wing death squad shot and killed a priest, Oscar Romero, as he was saying mass in an El Salvadoran church. He had been an outspoken critic of that country’s practice of “disappearing people.” An advocate of the teaching of Jesus, he cared for the poor and welcomed the stranger just like Pope Francis.

May they both rest in peace.