Go to sleep very late, wake up very early, out with pup by 7. I feel I should work briskly at getting my breakfast (or is it brunch?) foods ready, but the Blueberry-Lemon Buckle is baked (I had not known until this week what a Buckle was!), and the asparagus is chopped, and the Gruyere and Emmental cheeses are grated, and the table is set -- all done last night. So what else is there to do?
I cut up some fruit, make a cup of coffee and go to the porch outside with my lists. I have two going: one for the trip and one for the garden. I study them. Think about them. Add things to them, in the rare moment that something strikes me, and then I brush Millie. Such a different approach to food prep from the time I hosted my first brunch for company in 1977, at the age of 24. That one was to appear on the table at 11 and it didn't make it there until the late afternoon. I was ambitious but unpracticed.
(I put together a bench last night -- Millie thinks it's cool... to stay under it)
It is quite rare that strange people come to Sally's House and I'm curious how Millie will behave.
(brushed and ready to greet)
I soon find out: a tentative hello, a wag, permission given to be petted, and then a retreat to sleep under the couch where she basically dozes until they leave around noon. Talk about dogs who are seen but not heard!
It's a good morning for the adults in the room, albeit one has experienced some loss recently and so we shelve the silliness in favor of the sympathetic.
Still, it is great to be with people your age or older on occasion. We talk about stuff that uniquely belongs to septos and octos, and no one is surprised at the list of doctors' visits and the physical quirks we face. We speculate, too, about why it is that adult children don't especially relish hearing our wisdoms or suggestions or even inquiries into their doings. True, I should not be surprised that this is the case. My mother was full of comments on my daily movements, and if she asked questions, I sensed just from her tone alone that she was conveying much more than a simple thirst for information, and it irked me no end each time I heard that tone. Of course, being of the repressed-tward-their-elders generation, I never let her know it. Our kids are much more comfortable in speaking honestly and laying out the terms of familial relationships. Which is a good thing, right?
Toward the end, we set a time and place for our next breakfast meeting. I suggest my place again because it will be so new and so different. In one year, I will have hosted four morning meals, each one at a different home (the farmhouse, the Edge, Sally's House, and next month -- Steffi's). My friends ask me -- how do you handle moving so often? It's a good question, for which I do not have an answer. Only that I do really hope that this is the end of my packing and hauling, until they drag me out in a state of incompetence, disability, or on a stretcher in a state of rigor mortis.
Once they leave, I return to the trivial stuff of the everyday. And Millie and I drive over to the farmhouse so that I can give Ed some leftover Buckle and I can pick up peaches that have started arriving from Georgia. Millie then goes to daycare (for a really short visit) and I pick up Sparrow. And eventually Snowdrop, who stayed late in school in support of a protest event. Or was it that it was an event that had earlier triggered protest? I cant tell. Kids talk in shortcuts.
No Sally's House today -- it's late and I still have errands to do before picking up Millie. I leave the kids with their mom...
And I drive to the nearby K&A Nursery. I had counted no fewer than 15 empty spaces in the front beds at Steffi's. I have 5 plants lined up for some of these, but 10 are still question marks. Of course, it can all wait. Or, I can look around to see if I missed something interesting in the greenhouse. Oh, tall phlox, here at last! Such color for late summer!
Toward evening, Millie and I return home. The beds at Steffi's definitely should have been watered today, but I do not want to leave Millie alone when she already has had her independent time at daycare. And here's a pleasant prediction: we may get some rain tonight. That would be nothing short of magnificent! The earth everywhere is parched and cracked, the clay is baked. Let the showers begin! Please.
with so much love...
