A little weirdness. A little anxiety. Don't know why. Free-floating.

The neighbor kids climbed into a U-Haul truck with their Mum & Step-pop yesterday and drove away forever. I had laden them with stuffed animals and glossy picture books and double-A batteries to keep their other toys going, a big plastic tub of scissors and paper and paints and brushes and glue in case the neighbor lady where they moved didn't have these things for them to borrow. A porcelain statuette of white doves on a branch for the eldest girl, grown remote from me in adolescence who was a nervous grinning whirl of energy when we met four years ago.

I cried a little, and then in the early evening in the front yard as I untangled the skeins of garden hoses I'd finally pulled out from winter storage I met the new neighbors - Samuel, Akyra, Freya, aged 6ish, 4ish, and four months, respectively - as they took a constitutional with their proud parents. Not the same, these guys, though cute as buttons all of them, but I feel a little better knowing they're there. Spent my whole life expecting to channel the grandmothers who did so well by me when I was small - wanting to pass on some of that - not understanding the vast misunderstandings that would intervene to prevent this expression to my own grandchildren. So the kids around me give relief in a way, accept what I have to give. I feel a little less pointless.

As for the hoses, they survived winter intact, and now the sprinklers are squirting the white clover and yarrow. Later I'll grease up the lawnmower and see whether it will start.