Evergreen

First, just let me say that six hours in a Daycare Center with 3 year olds at 42? What am I? Desperate? Oh, paying bills. Right.

One of the things I disliked about my house in Maine were the pine trees (yeah, yeah, Pine Tree State - so sue me). They weren't the really pretty Blue Spruce (or whatever) kind. They're the scraggly, thin ones whose needles turn brown and then fall off every autumn. And they did so on my car. In multitudes. I admit it bothered me to have the left side of my car coated in pine sap and the needles all over my back wiper, making it difficult to actually...wipe.

So, here I am, in my cute, airy little fourplex. The shower head leaks, the washing machine only works on hot water, the dishwasher only works on the Pots and Pans setting, and one of the burners on the stove doesn't work. The biggest one, of course. Making it a little challenging to cook with that big ol' 12 inch skillet on the little itty bitty electric burners. But I digress. It's new carpet, plenty of space and actually more storage than I had in my house! That's just wrong on so many levels.

And the other thing it has? A shared driveway and garage. Not that the garage can actually be used for anything but storage. These things were built before the days of SUVs. My neighbor could fit her Toyota in there, if the previous tenants hadn't left roomfuls of furniture in the garage. Which, if not cleared out soon, I'm gonna start claiming. So I park on the side that's designated and I'll be damned if today I wasn't digging scraggly brown pine needles from that depression right in front of the windshield and from under my windshield wipers. The only tree on the entire property and it's a frickin' pine tree just like the ones I left, right next to my car!

When people here ask me what Maine was like, I say "It was a lot like my driveway." Although there may be more moose here in Minnesota. And they talk funny, eh?