from the porch

Well now, if you don’t call this a tough, tougher than nails posting day, I don’t know what would qualify. First of all, to give myself time, more time to write and also to align myself a tad more with the person at home who scorns neatness, I have switched to a biweekly (rather than weekly) farmhouse cleaning schedule (with spot checks for cat hairs and such in between). That bi-weekly cleaning moment fell on today. The still sore back made scrubbing the shower stall to a shine a challenge.

But wait, it gets more boring than that. I put on a ridiculous outfit of tight sweats and a petticoat type thing (because it was there, okay?) and set about to listen to hours of tapes. I had to do it and I had the time today to do it and so I listened and took notes. These tapes are only somewhat useful in that they let me do some fact checking in the text of my writing project, but I would be negligent not to listen to them (again – I’d already heard them some years back). So I listened. From the porch.

 

In between there are the usual computer skirmishes and searches. (It’s very easy to misplace tapes when they’re actually not tapes at all but files on a computer and who knew which computer – turns out not this one, nor that one and not on the back-up hardrive and if you haven’t searched for stuff on your back-up hardrive lately, you haven’t lived!)

And Isis came and went and the sun came and went and sometimes Isis and the sun came and went together...

And then I wrote some more.

In the evening, we had a pleasurable hour with my daughter and her fiancée and that’s always a sweet way to interrupt a Sunday. They're tired, but don't let that fool you. They are happy.

We eat out on the porch and it storms, briefly but violently and that makes me want to put down the (eek! metal!) fork and go right back inside, but I am surrounded by braver (and more realistic) types and so we persevere and here I am alive to tell you about it.

Eventually the sun does shine again.

(Ed scrapes the bottom of the pan when the food is to his liking.)

After, he and I are settling in to an evening of writing, watching, reading and listening to the animal upstairs (in the attic?) move around.

Can it chew through a wall? I ask.

I don’t know, Ed tells me.

I sometimes think that he’d like these things to happen, just so he can learn how to fix the damage.

It's a beautiful night out there on the porch. Inside as well.