Windy days and Royal Weddings.

We have had more windy days these past three weeks than I can ever remember. During the day, the wind is so strong that the feathers on the chickens stand straight up at times... they look like hens having bad-feather days. At night, we can hear the wind just howling outside like a freight train.

Early this morning when I went outside to clean the coop, it was as silent as an abandoned church... not so much as a breeze, and it seemed so weird. It didn't last long, though. The wind kicked up later on in the morning and it's been howling and blowing ever since.

The wind hasn't been helping all the wild fires around the state, and every day we hear about more fires popping up and destroying countless acres of homes and property. You would think that people would be extra extra careful these days, with no rain for three months now and you just know that everything is dry, dry, dry.... one little spark is all it would take to set things burning. Which, of course, keeps happening.

I spent yesterday taking down the Easter decorations... the two Easter trees are put away in the closet, along with my Easter parade of porcelain bunnies and chicks and ducks. All wrapped up till next year. We had Easter dinner with neighbors J & J... they did the cooking, I baked a carrot cake for dessert. J was fussing around with the table settings just before we sat down to eat, and she said that when they come to our house, I make everything look so easy and effortless. Well, if that's how it looks, it's only because no one is here to see the four days before a holiday dinner, when I'm crossing countless things off a to-do list.

Only a few more days now till William and Kate's wedding. I will be setting the alarm and getting up in the middle of the night to watch it all from beginning to end. I'm sure my husband thinks I've lost my mind, but my cousin F in NY totally understands. She is the family expert on the Royals, and knows all of the history since their early beginnings.

I watched Diana and Charles get married, as well as Princess Anne, and Andrew and Fergie, and Edward and Sophie. When Diana died, I watched the funeral and went through half a box of tissues. Why is it that the whole world felt they had lost an old friend when that car crashed in Paris?

My collection of books on the Royals keeps growing, and I look at them all from time to time. I'm sure I will be buying a book on William and Kate's wedding... heaven knows there will be many to choose from after the wedding is over. My friend J in England will be watching the wedding also-- from her TV, not from the streets of London. With all the crowds that will be there, she would rather have the best seat possible-- in her own living room.

The pomp and pageantry of Royal events-- no one does it like the British. The carriages, the horses, the history, the gowns, the hats, all those people happily waving their flags... it's an every-day reality sprinkled with fairy tale dust that makes it all magical.

When Diana and Charles were in that carriage riding through the crowds thirty years ago, everyone had such hope and joy and expectations for a long and happy life for them. At that moment in the history of time, it seemed like everything in the world was at a perfect stand-still and nothing else mattered, nothing bad was going to happen, and everyone was just as happy as they could possibly be.

And when William and Kate ride through the London sreets in their carriage on Friday, everyone will be overwhelmed with memories of Diana and we will all be hoping for a fairy-tale perfect marriage for her son and his bride.