Twice recently I found myself literally jumping up and down delirious with some sort of emotion I’m not sure I could identify. The last time I felt it, I was around 16 years old playing in the mud with my buddy Princehoss. That girl knew, and still knows, how to play. Holy crap! That’s what I was doing. I was playing! Well, I love to play and I am going to do it more often.

In the first case of joy jumping, I was actually jumping. I got an invite to double dutch from Tamale. She and her chick rocker friends, literally chick rocker friends as they were all female and played drums or guitar, have a dutch gang and they let this old lady hang with them. We tried variants on rope swinging and running in and out of the ropes and best of all I had to jump a six-foot chain link fence to get to the slab. Of course I was bone sore later and it didn’t help that I ripped my ass muscle to disability, but it was so worth it.

The following weekend Anna came over and taught me how to make my wannabe petite diced tomato cans into flowers with tin snips and spray paint. Jesse nailed them to our backyard fence for color in this drab desert town. I took pix of the whole experience – from flesh slicing snipping to spray paint tagging to gloating fence nailing. Maybe I’ll share with you the secrets of my creative, artistic mentor in a future pictorial, but for now all you need to know is that seeing the final product made me squeak and jump. I can only imagine what Anna thought, but she still talks to me so I couldn’t have totally blown my cool. The above flower my kids call the sun star flower.

Joy.