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Another sunny morning, and although the lilacs and forsythia and pears are all preparing to bloom, the maple and beeches over here on the east side of the hill are still bare, still allowing the sunshine to bake the last summer’s leaves where they lay thickly on the ground.

That’s one thing. Another thing is that I probably won’t go out in it, this beautiful morning, that is. My chest is tight as a drum and it occurs to me that carbon footprints have been stamping all over my neighborhood and probably everyone elses, encouraging pollen to fly, heat to rise and molds to greet every day with a smile.

Another point. You’ll begin to understand how confused I am. Why aren’t there any articles in the newspapers about the potential suffering of our children and grandchildren as they face the effects of global warming. How is it that we protect these children and grandchildren with our investments in digging up the ground for oil and gas and cutting up mountain tops to uncover coal, instead of spending these huge sums of money on such relatively harmless sources of energy as wind and sun and the rotting leaves our trees give us every winter.

My friends and I are having lunch when these topics come up.

Well, then, what can we do?

Nothing.

I’m enjoying a hamburger, a hamburger with tomato and avocado. It tastes awfully good.

Our children and grandchildren can go on eating hamburgers till the cows run out I say with a chuckle, and we go ahead with our discussion of various garden plans for this year. My vegetable garden concerns me in spite of my pessimistic outlook, in part because in spite of the talk about the futility of looking to the future, we can’t let the old, the ancient, habits of plant, and cultivate and grow that we have developed over the millennia go simply because it seems to be part of the program. Nowadays, engaged in what I see is a gratuitous season at the end of life’s trimester process, I don’t want to forget that among us humans life in utero is a trimester system.It our mammalian duty to grow in this way, and though we often try to alter it with our many medical successes, it remains the same. Now I and some of my friends are pausing in this interim which may be a gift that we should try to use while we are still enjoying the other gift, the gift of humanity which only lasts for a season. I first discovered this need for people to explain their particular predicament, bad legs, arthritic joints, kidney, liver and heart malfunctions, when my mother, having broken her hip and begun to grow blind, found herself behind her walker in a nursing home, a place where people from many walks of life spend this last holiday, thinking of themselves standing in a line to heaven. Mother’s friend Elna came up with the answer that the other lades all felt was reasonable.

God will take each of us in turn, and he’ll pick in the order he wants. You can’t tell God what to do.

Yoga and Christianity teach us that every day is a gift and that it is our duty to fill it well, so that’s what I’ll try to do today. I’m going to order a chair made for the arthritic hip. That’s first. Then I will plan the beds in the vegetable garden. I might even order the materials for a raised bed that I can access by my new chair. I’m going to fill up these days as best I can. I don’t want God to think I’m wasting the time he has offered me.