This is one of the gorgeous times of years here. We have our sour cherry, two crab apples and two pear trees in bloom as well as the shad. We still have at least 100 daffodils blooming, dark blue hyacinths, orange, red, pink, white tulips and blue forget me nots. We have been eating salads from our garden and yesterday had our first spinach. All the deciduous trees on the Cape [except the black locusts, always the very last to put out their leaves] have leafed out, some like the silver maples, heavy with foliage already; some like the white and scrub oaks, buds just opened. Magnolias, ornamental cherries, crabapples are in full luscious bloom in yards all over the Outer Cape. Beach plum bushes and shad trees are flowering in the wild areas that are not pine or oak woods. The hummingbirds are back as are the orioles and myriad tiny warblers I hear but can’t usually see. I heard a catbird imitating other birds yesterday. But Efi is gone. Twice she had slept so heavily I could not wake her. It was scary. Wednesday we took her to the vet. She had suffered from kidney disease for the last two years and cognitive dysfunction – kitty alzheimers – had gotten worse every month. But she was still a beautiful and affectionate cat. It turned out that she had a mass in her abdomen. At seventeen and a half she was too old to endure an operation and radiation. So she was injected with a sedative and then the injection that stops the heart. We buried her with all my other lost cats where we put them to rest on our land. Later we’ll plant a bush over her. The other four cats were freaked and angry. But they are settling down. Part of why they got angry is that Efi was taken out, never came back and then the next morning, we disappeared all day. I had a reading in Hingham, an old, pretty and very affluent outer suburb of Boston. Our friend Stephen had checked all the relevant sites and said the bridge was finished. The arrogant Army Corps of Engineers, we figured out en route, doesn’t feel the people on the Cape matter and is no longer informing us when the bridge if partly closed. Gee, just like Entergy that runs the Pilgrim nuclear power plant, a clone of Fukushima plants that are still spewing vast qualities of radiation into the air and the ocean. Shelter in place, Entergy and the government say, which is, Die where you are and your land will be unlivable for generations like Chernoble, since you live in the cone of radiation from what the NRC admits is one of the two worst nuclear power death machines in the country. Anyhow, I checked my Beat the Traffic app and the highway leading to the Sagamore Bridge was colored dark purple, meaning it was essentially a parking lot as it was when I was unable to get to the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. But this time we took our alternate route and got to Hingham in plenty of time. Every seat was filled, a good sized audience and enthusiastic. We sold every book we brought, but that wasn’t many, since the poetry group leader had told me there would be 20, not 200. I am working on the manuscripts of my juried intensive poetry class. Each participant gives me 15 poems to read and annotate. it takes me at least a day to do each one with the care they are entitled to. Next week will be very hectic. We have to drive into Boston twice for medical appointments and return from Beth Israel on Friday in the huge Memorial Day traffic. We figure it will take us at least 5 or 6 hours to do what we have often done in two plus a bit. But I finally see the surgeon who operated on my left knee, to schedule an operation on my right. It’s painful all the time now, no cartilage left. This has been a winter and spring of too much death. Xena and I miss Efi the most.