We have no plans for the long weekend, apart from reading through pages and pages and pages of documents about the physical, financial and whatnot health of a condo on which we may or may not put an offer.

It’s a pretty cool place that’s definitely in move in condition with one of them gourmet kitchens with bar stools and a counter to chow on eggs in some fabled suburban morning. It has a tiny back yard. (No fruit trees, alas, yet.) It also literally costs over 10 times what I mortgaged for my condo in Cambridge. That figure fucking scares me out of my socks and skivvies. Of course that was almost a decade and a half and 3,000 miles ago.

On a complete aside to the fruit trees aside above, I’m obsessed with things that fall from trees. It may be the climate, since it turns out money doesn’t grow on trees here but many other things upon which you could survive do. Our friends have plums just hanging there, waiting, sweetening, enticing. M.’s first apartment had oranges. It’s miraculous to a girl who grew up in proximity to crab apples only, and their only use was as missiles in great crap apple conflagrations.

(One such war created a DMZ right there on our property line. Detente could not be reached and never again did the Bradys acknowledge my family’s sovereign status. We were Palestine.)

But, more than that, I have very few, very weak, very distant memories of back in those glory days when Dad was alive and nurturing a family of five. It may be a false memory, or it may be true, but the thought of fruit trees resonates.

Back before the myocardial infarction that changed the lives of his wife and five children, while taking his life, Dad was promoted within a lucrative government-contracting type mega-corporation. He loaded up the station wagon and moved his family to Annapolis, MD, one of the bastions of the military-industrial complex. The young family bought a huge house (I think we all had our own bedrooms, a largesse foreign in our own circles in New England), and I think he planted fruit trees.

I don’t know why I think this thought. If anyone knows if it’s true or false, holler back.

Anyway, of course the title of this post has nothing to do with the above blather. Nay, that blather is about M. and his ways. Lately, he’s been going to bed earlier and earlier. He’s been rising earlier and earlier. Our usual weekend sleep in, which in my mind is more of a mandate given that it’s the unofficial end of summer and its supposed relaxation what with Labor Day weekend and all, was interrupted by his up-and-at-’em bound at 8:30 or 9 a.m. and announcement he was “going for a run.” Last night, a 10 p.m. movie was too late and out of reach.

I suspect he has a herd of cows that he is seeing, and milking, on the side. In the cover of dawn’s darkness, he heads to the pasture and attends his cattle. I feel this explanation is the only logical one.

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