Whenever my daughter sees one of these warning signs she points a finger and says: "Ha! Whose idea of a child is that? Look at those muscles -- that's an Olympic athlete!"

But no, I say, those aren't the thighs of a long distance skater, that's just a stout child wearing the short, bulky britches favored by boys rolling hoops down Main Street at the turn of the 20th century, and he's got himself a nice warm sweater. (The right hand is, I confess, a bit troublesome; if he's not wearing a baseball glove this child must count lobsters in his ancestry.)

Whatever the case it's a waste of a good sign; with that 12 foot running stride, what's the chances of hitting one of the little buggers anyway?

Two ancient apple trees, run amok, canopy the addition on my house. On windy November nights they rake like skeletons across our second story bedroom roof.

When I was a boy they were proper little apple trees, stout stems with afros; and they enjoyed the luxury of an open field. On summer evenings, after the field was mowed, my brother and I would hit baseballs; many a ball was snatched from the low branches of that first apple tree. If you could hit a ball into the second apple tree it was an accomplishment indeed, you might be allowed to lean on the bat to admire it for a moment. And if you could throw a ball back from the second apple tree . . . well you couldn't throw a ball back from the second apple tree . . . but if you could have you'd have been superhuman. So we tried.

So here's the thing . . . when you decide that the 25 year old wood stove in the living room has become more threat than comfort, and then you sell it on eBay to someone with imagination, and you buy yourself a nice new stove, and when the new stove weighs 445 lbs., and you decide to spend money that you shouldn't to have a splendid section of Mexican wall tile installed, it's a reallyreally good idea to get the tiling completed before you have the stove delivered.

Someone in my work world, someone I don't know a bit, is making life difficult.

Puts me of a mind of my uncle Archer. Archer Pleadwell. Archer, dead now, meant no harm even at his most vital; but during World War II, while stationed in Guam, the Irish boys in his company treated him like dirt, wouldn't have a thing to do with him. I imagine Archer, twisting one way then the other in front of a mirror, trying to see what they saw.

Months passed before one of the lads let slip that the first English tax collector in Ireland, some 200 years prior, was a deeply reviled man named Pleadwell (Plaidwell, he called him). Sins of the father.

You just never know who might be trying to get in touch, so I keep a cordless phone in my darkroom.

Has this ever happened to you? You meet someone for the first time and you have the immediate sense that the two of you have so much in common that you are destined to become fast friends. But it doesn't happen. And with the passage of time you grow to think the other person must be kind of thick. But 30 or 40 years later you decide that if anyone was "right" it was apparently the other person; and that you have been the dummy all along?

Does that ever happen to you? It happens to me.

A lot.

When I was fifteen I could lure the cows from the barnyard up to the night pasture with a promise of apples and the expectation of a starlit night. Willy would lead the way and the others would follow through the woods in a straggling bovine procession.

High on the open field that was the night pasture I would knock runty Baldwins to the ground and chuck them downhill where they'd be rooted from the grass by snuffling cows, their near vision compromised by side-mounted eyes.

But that was very long ago. Nowadays the cows sleep in the barn, the apple trees are all but gone, and I do shoulder exercises in the distant hope of encountering a cow and an apple at the same time.