'Drop-ins' spoil breakfast

It seemed like a good idea at the time.
It was Memorial Day morning, and the sun was shining.
Suddenly it felt as if a switch had been flipped and it was instantly summer. A chilly, wet, frustrating spring was just a memory.
As I started to make the morning coffee, the patio beckoned.
“Outside?” my wife asked.
“Sure,” I said.
Enjoyable moments on the patio have been rare this year. A portion of the backyard might still be able to qualify for wetland status, and the mosquitoes are likely to be intolerable in a few weeks. But the idea of breakfast on the patio on a holiday morning was enticing.
I worked on the coffee and poured a couple of glasses of V-8 juice. Connie set to work chopping up some melon and some pineapple, then tossed in some blueberries to make a fruit dish.
While she did that, I swept off the table and patio chairs. There were little green things sprinkled all over them, like chocolate sprinkles on ice cream. Some sort of seed pod, I figured.
Connie grabbed some placemats and napkins, while I got my iPod and speaker dock.
(If we were going to do this, we were going to do it right. It could look luxurious without being expensive, and a little background music never hurt anybody.)
Before you know it, there we were, sitting at the table with our juice and fruit, the coffee brewing in the kitchen and Bob Marley’s “Legend” album playing on the iPod.
And then it happened.
The green sprinkles started dropping.
We have an ash tree in our backyard, one we’ll probably lose to the ash borer one of these days in spite of our best efforts. Some forest experts will tell you that an ash is a trash tree, but we’ve liked it.
It has a few quirks. It loses its leaves all at once, usually in about a day or two. And it’s slow to leaf out in the spring, but when it does, it provides plenty of shade.
It also sends out a lot of seedlings, the green sprinkles now dropping all over our breakfast. Chances are, like the leafing out and dropping of leaves, it will all be over in a day or two.
But on Memorial Day morning, the green sprinkles were dropping like the raindrops that have been so plentiful.
They were in our hair, they were on our clothes, they were on our placemats, and they were getting into our food.
It’s a little hard to eat your breakfast when you have to hold your hand over your juice glass and the morning paper over your fruit.
We toughed it out for a couple of minutes. Then there was a breeze, and we found ourselves in a green blizzard.
That did it. Fruit, V-8, placemats, and napkins went back inside. Bob Marley wailed to himself in our absence.
We ventured out later with coffee, and it was a little better.
But by then the mosquitoes were awake and hungry.
Are we giving up? Of course not, anyone who lived through the weather we’ve had in 2011 knows you have to be prepared to grab your moment when you can.
We’ll try again, once the ash tree is done with its sprinkling and maybe before the mosquitoes are awake.[[In-content Ad]]