A Pie Dough Kind of Day

When my grandmother baked a pie, she'd roll out the dough, place a turned-over pie plate on top of it and trace a knife around the plate to get the right-sized crust. Then she'd gather up all the scraps that fell outside the circle, roll them together into a small, flat patchwork crust, sprinkle it with cinnamon and sugar, and bake it alongside the pie as a special treat for my sister and me. I think that's how we got Leap Day. Horology experts (who presumably had grandmothers) figured out they could tidy up the calendar by sweeping up all the bits of leftover time from four years' worth of ordinary days and smooshing them into one whole extra day.

So is Leap Day a treat? Should it be a holiday? I'd like that, I think. How nice it would be to wake up and think: "Ah, it's Leap Day--twenty-four hours that don't count. Today I have time to read or write or paint or sit outside and daydream in the sun." Actually, being retired, I have time for that on almost any given day, but it feels self-indulgent to do fun things while the rest of the adults in the family are busy at their jobs. Guilt ruins a lot of potentially nice moments. 

The only momentous thing about this particular February 29th is that my grass was cut this morning for the first time in 2016, signifying the transition from tracked-in-mud season to tracked-in-grass-clippings season, the only two seasons that exist here in South Dogdom. If that's all that makes this Leap Day special, so be it. Life is good, and an extra day of it suits me just fine.