Good Day, Sunshine!

Remember those gorgeous Spring days when the sun was shining, and you'd drag the record player to the other room and stick the speakers in the windows, find your favorite Beatles record, and play "Good Day, Sunshine" while your mom pulled weeds and you raked the crass clippings into a wheelbarrow that would be hauled up to the vegetable garden and thrown down between the rows of onions, carrots, peas and lettuce?

Remember how the wind would blow ever so gently, just enough to cool the sweat on your brow, but not so wild as to toss around the piles of clippings you'd worked so hard to rake? If you did a good job, there might be a trip to the ice cream shop in your future, or a few dollars in your pocket to use at that summer's festival. Every once in a while, you'd stop for a drink of ice water or fresh mint tea, and you'd linger a bit too long, and your mom would shout out a reminder to get back to work, and you'd haul yourself back in from the roof to go back to the sunshine and grass and dandelion fluff and bickering with your sisters or brothers. And if no one was looking, you could lay back in the cool grass under the tree or stretch out in the hammock until someone noticed and cried "no fair!" And then you'd grudgingly pick up a rake and get back to work. At least until you could sneak away long enough to take a peek into the bluebird box and see that there's a mama bird sitting on her tiny sky blue eggs.

Yeah.

That's what my kids' day is like today, right down to the record player in the window. Since their sister sent her Beatles vinyls home from college yesterday, they've been spinnin' the tunes, and it's a soundtrack custom-made for a day like today. "Here Comes the Sun" and "Good Day, Sunshine" are in rotation.

"I need to laugh, and when the sun is out
I've got something I can laugh about
I feel good, in a special way
I'm in love and it's a sunny day."

I'm telling you, there could barely be a better day, unless I had a maid to clean my house and a cook to make dinner while I'm outside digging in the dirt, spreading manure and sowing seeds.

I have work to do inside, filling out forms and finishing video projects, but I just can't tear myself away from the beauty of this day. I absolutely want to soak up every minute of this paradise.