“You bring the coffee. I’ll cook the breakfast,” George Mackenzie had told the boys. 
    They had been getting takeout from Mabel’s Grill since the beginning of the latest lockdown but when the styrofoam containers filled the garbage bin so much she couldn’t  put the bottle cap from her bottled water in, George’s wife got fed up. 
    “Why don’t you just cook breakfast here,” she’d said. “You’ll save the planet and your pocketbook.”
    So George had the table set on his back porch when Dave Winston drove into the yard and Cliff Murray arrived with coffee from Mabel’s. As they sat in the warmth of the spring sunshine, George elbowed the screen door open and delivered plates of fried eggs and sausages.
    “Where’s the toast?” Dave wondered.
    “I got outsmarted by a smart toaster,” George admitted sheepishly.
    “A smart toaster?” Cliff said. “What the heck is that?”
    “My wife likes gadgets,” sighed George. “She saw this toaster on TV so she went out and bought one. I gotta admit it makes perfect toast, changing the toast time according what kind of bread you’re using, but she controls it with an app on her smart phone and I don’t have the app or a smart phone.”
    “Maybe you could have called her at the work and she could turn it on for you from there,” Dave laughed.
    “Maybe, but she hates me calling. Says it interrupts her. She likes people to text her so she can get it whenever she wants.”
    “And you only got a flip phone that’s hard to text on,” said Dave.
    “I like things simple,” George grumbled. “I want a phone that’s just a phone.”
    “It’s hard to get anything that’s just plain and simple these day,” sighed Cliff. “We got a new washing machine that’s got all the bells and whistles. But if my wife’s washing sheets and they get twisted, the thing bogs down between the wash and rinse cycles. So she sorts out the sheets and starts all over at the beginning but it gets stuck again. It’s like something from Groundhog Day. I’ve got so when she heads for the laundry room, I head for the barn. A man shouldn’t know his wife knows that sort of language.”
     “Anyway, I can’t wait for Mabel’s to be open again so we can have breakfast there,” George said.
    “I’ll bet Mabel is even more impatient,” said Dave. “It’ll be even better when we all get vaccinated and she can be full capacity.”
    “They finally got down to my age group the other day so I got my shot,” Cliff said. “I’d thought all along that the first thing I’d do when I got vaccinated would be to get a haircut, but then they closed the barbershops.”
    “See, that’s where I’m ahead of you,” said George. “The wife told me the other day that I needed a hair cut and I asked her ‘Which one: ­ the one on the left or the one on the right.’”
    “Some of the politicians must be waiting until we all get vaccinated before they get a hair cut,” Dave said. “People like the Mayor of Toronto and the Prime Minister are a pretty hairy lot.”
    George snorted. “Politicians are always a hairy lot!”  
    The conversation was interrupted as Cliff deftly swiped a fly out of the air that was eyeing his sausages. “Damn flies,” he grumbled.
    “Hey, my wife got excited when she read the article in the last Rural Voice about farming flies,” said Dave. “She figured with all the cluster flies we’ve got we had a head start. But then she read it was a special sort of fly.”
    “Yeah, big suckers, weren’t they,” said Cliff. “I hope none of those get out into nature or I’ll need a bigger fly swatter.”
    George shook his head. “Farming flies. What will they think of next?”
    “I wonder if it will ever get like regular farming where you’ll listen to the market report on the radio in the morning and they say “Choice flies sold in a range from $5 to $6 a pound”, Dave wondered.◊