I’m loading mule-writers all day but there’s a kink in the project. What? How can anything but find joy in my entering uniqueness? It’s Ruth Florence Chapman Heinold. My mom. She’s 90 years old today and we’re going to take a ride into the hinterlands to Carolyn Sleeper’s Slatestone Studio to visit both the potter and her spouse, Danny. The dogwoods are in bloom, as are the forsythia, japonica, azaleas, tulips…

So, I hear your thoughts (via this intertubal communication device). Why didn’t Valerie plan ahead? Why didn’t she load everything earlier this week? For the answer to that, please reference the above paragraph. My grandsons-superb wanted to be with Nanna this week. Ollie in particular found his planting ability to be hyper-active and dig he must. Watching him dig up a mound of dirt with a silver serving spoon, accurately place said dirt into the bed of a 1955 Tonka truck (mine from childhood), and then “beep beep beep” the truck’s backing-upping somehow seemed much more important than entering Mule prose.

Add to that my mom sitting on her garden throne of pillows watching the backing-upping process — what would have done? Sit in the house with an iBook loading Mules or scrambling around the yard taking photos and handing out animal crackers?

I think the choice is clear to even the most callous of Mule contributors.

Family trumps all. We know that. You know that.

A hearty thank you to husband Robert MacEwan for developing this Mule format. It is elegant in form and easily loaded in function. More thanks be to Helen Losse, Phoebe Kate Foster, Tracy Whitaker and others for their efforts.

It is Spring. Maybe not on the proper calendar but cetainly in my yard.

-Valerie MacEwan