The garden is all green, claustrophobic lushness, buds everywhere waiting for a good stretch of sun and warmth to burst. But those short instances when the skies do clear are not enough it seems. Not a single rose yet, would you believe. The coldest spring in 40 years we have been told. On Sunday it was so wet and cold that we went to the museum to warm up. Practicing for retirement when we'll be poor again and heating fuel will become a luxury.
Too much gallivanting on different continents, too many wild job schemes for a decent pension to accumulate. All those nixers, the barter, the commune stuff, the co-ops, the gifts that were supposedly coming round and round, the exchange society of our idealistic dream years. Plus the years working in paradise where the sun drops into the Indian Ocean every day at 6:30 pm with the birds and their racket in the casuarina pines while I swim out to the little jetty after a long day of work. There is nowhere to enter this stuff on the annual state pension insurance forms. We have a "gap" of about 15 years and it looks like we were living on another planet. Come to think of it, we probably did.

Sometimes I worry about it. But not too often. Not yet. It will work out, we tell ourselves, we will grow more food, build a clay oven, move downstairs, and and and...maybe even discover the true pension contribution of those 15 years of very basic communal living.