The Annual Ritual

She's an unlikely "twin", because she's slender to the point of reediness and has a glorious flow of lustrous dark hair to a point halfway down her back, but we share the same birthday (though she's fifteen years younger than I am). We used to work together, and we got along famously, even though we had a jokey rivalry over the wineberries on a jobsite, leading to our "raspberry summit", when we used the driveway and parking lot of the site as a line of demarcation- she getting the berries south of the drive, and I getting those north of the drive (for the record, my parting gift to her was a big jar of homemade jam).

Anyway, the first thing this morning, I received the traditional text message from my twin, and she taunted me by telling me that she knows where the gaps in the fence around the property are. Joke's on her... I decided that the best way to keep people from crawling through the gaps was to train the berry briars across the gaps, as a sort of "biological warfare"- of a purely defensive nature, of course. All kidding aside, I told her I'm planning on grabbing so many mulberries this year that I will have a big bucket of mixed berries with her name on it. We were only fruit rivals in our ongoing comedy routine... I learned long ago that bitter fruit rivalries only lead to a fruitless end. Besides, it's her birthday.

Postscript: Mom also called, and I received text messages from several friends. While I am working tonight, so things will be low-key, I went out for beer and trivia with a bunch of old friends last night, and am planning on going out for a gin-and-tonic or two with friends tomorrow evening. It's a funny week, two friends of mine celebrated their birthdays yesterday and one of my uncles celebrates his on the 20th. It's a busy week, a happy week.