Except for a couple large bookcases (which I have advertised in the paper today) and three office chairs and a couple of small tables, I'm pretty much rid of the larger pieces. Will be easier, too, not having to mess with any clothes or books. Well, a few books but not my usual large collection. I've been thinking about what I'm going to do with myself once the sale is over and the excess is delivered to the thrift shop. All my sewing and craft supplies are put away and even my flowers have gone so there won't be any outside chores to do. I may wander from room to room at first but I'll figure it out. I'd better. It just might be several months or more before my name gets to the top of the waiting list.
Today I picked a sink full of plums from my tree in the back yard. Decided to post them on the free website and a lady came and took them away. I had to apologize, though, that after I got them in the sink, I half suspected I should have waited another two weeks as some seemed green and hard. How can I be so dim witted all the time? She was happy to get them anyhow and I gave her a quart of frozen rhubarb I had in the freezer to make up for her travel over here. Which was only a few blocks but I still felt like an idiot.
Here's a couple of the pictures I saw on Facebook today.
I did go out to pull a few dandelion stems in the front yard. They need a weed eater, though. Just too thick and too high. Where are the deer when you want them?! I cleaned out the bird baths and put in fresh water and hauled a few pots over to the other side of the house. The ground is nice and flat over there and the grass isn't high so I plan on using that area for outside stuff in the sale like garden tools, the ladder, flower pots, lawn decorations, lumber, etc.
One thing I do plan on doing with my spare time is to catch up on reading. I'm working on a John Updike book right now called "My Father's Tears". He talked about going to his high school reunion and it was so good, I decided to use it in my blog post today.
It shocks me, at my high school class reunions, when my classmates bother to tell me how much they prefer my second wife. It is true, Sylvia really mixes it up with them, in a way that Deb shyly didn't. But then, Deb assumed that they were part of my past, something I had put behind me but reunited with every five years or so, whereas Sylvia, knowing me in my old age, recognizes that I have never really left Pennsylvania, that it is where the self I value is stored, however infrequently I check on its condition. The most recent reunion, the fifty-fifth, might have depressed Deb --all these people in their early seventies, most of them still living in the county within a short drive of where they had been born, even in the same semi-detached houses where they had been raised. Some came in wheelchairs, and some were too sick to drive and were chauffeured to the reunion by their middle-aged children. The list of our deceased classmates on the back of the program grows longer; the class beauties have gone to fat or bony cronehood; the sports stars and non-athletes alike move about with the aid of pacemakers and plastic knees, retired and taking up space at an age when most of our fathers were considerately dead.
But we don't see ourselves that way, as lame and old. We see kindergarten children--the same round fresh faces, the same cup ears and long-lashed eyes. We hear the gleeful shrieking during elementary-school recess and the seductive saxophones and muted trumpets of the locally bred swing bands that serenaded the blu-lit gymnasium during high school dances. We see in each other the enduring multiplicities of a town rendered changeless by Depression and then by a world war whose bombs never reached us, though rationing and toy tanks and air-raid drills did. Old rivalries are rekindled and put aside; old romances flare for a moment and subside into the general warmth, the diffuse love.
When the class secretary takes the microphone and runs us through a quiz on the old days the answers are shouted out on all sides. Not one piece of trivia stumps us: we were there, together, then, and the spouses good-naturally applaud so much long-hoarded treasures of useless knowing.
Well, that's about it for now. Gonna smell up the house with fish since that's what I grabbed out of the freezer this morning. Think I'll just make a fishwich out of it and if I get real energetic, I might hunt for that other pkg of rhubarb and make up a small cobbler. Gonna fix zucchini tomorrow. My brother, Dana, gave me one from his garden when I stopped in yesterday. He's working on his 4th book so we never hear from him. He's like a hermit at his computer.
Oh, one more thing.... I had to laugh at Mary's email a few days back when they returned from a weekend getaway. She wrote: Poppy was wiped out from the walk to the river, so she slept most of the time. This AM we just packed up, went to a park where both Jake and Poppy could run. Then to breakfast and hit the road. We got home around Noon. Its just over an hour drive, so quick and painless. Poppy was so happy to be home she ran through every room in the house, laid down, wiggled on her back and head, got up and ran to the next room. It was hilarious.
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