Like now. When our forced air system stays balanced at seventy degrees. When it’s too cool for the air-conditioner. When it’s too warm for the heater. When even turning up the overhead fan to the highest setting — what my husband affectionately terms ‘hurricane force winds’ — offers no relief.
As lovely as it is outside right now, inside it’s anything but. Mild temperate evenings is a surefire recipe for staying sleepless on a stuffy second floor.
After three nights of tossing and turning earlier this week, I finally woke up to the fact that this house is blessed with forty windows! Twenty of them upstairs. I know since I stripped and painted every one of these windows, the first winter we lived here. And though most are closed off with a fixed storm window, enough can be opened to create a nice cross-breeze.
Old houses were designed to invite in every bit of wind that is within its general vicinity. And like most old houses in the area, our master bedroom was designed off of the pattern of an old sleeping porch, with our bed nestled between three sides having two windows each.
Last night, with one window open on either side of our bed, sleeping in between became suddenly easy.
I can think of no better place to spend Holy Week than down on my knees, out in the garden.
I’ve devoted the better part of the last three days to my garden; I’ve trimmed, cleaned up leaf debris and planted a few bulbs. Except for planting annuals, which will need to wait for a few more days, my garden is reading for its Spring growing fling.
Caring for my small Mesta Park garden is no full-time job. After caring for lawn and gardens at our Texas home — which covered almost half an acre, I’m almost embarrassed to call what I do here in Mesta Park ‘gardening.’
Today, with all my ‘gardening’ chores done, but with leftover desire to keep gardening, I rang up the owner of the duplex next door today to see if I could come over and play in his dirt. He’s so pleased with what we did together last fall — with his money and my time — that I learned I’m to come over any time I want.
So now, in addition to my own property, I have two duplexes whose front yards I care for on the block, counting the ‘Cinderella’ duplex across the street. These three are still only half of what I cared for in Texas. It’s my own little ministry, where I share my know-how and love of gardening with some good neighbors. It’s just me and God creating a little beauty together.
It feels good to work with my hands, to think creatively off of the written page. The down-side, for my husband anyways, is that I’ve been so tired, we’ve gone out to eat the last three evenings.
Tonight, after dinner, my husband suggested an evening walk with the dogs. It was so pretty, I had to run back in to grab my camera. It was quiet — we walked in silence — covered by the light from old streetlamps. The sky was rosy pink when we began and soft cornflower blue by the time we got home.
On days like these, I can think of no better place to live than in this old neighborhood.
Use to be, folks would go calling on Sunday afternoons — long leisurely face-to-face visits rather than the at most, quick chats on the phone that suffice these days.
The visits often came by surprise. At my grandparent’s house, the visitors were mostly family, who just dropped by to chat without making an appointment. Invariably, the impromptu call would interrupt the standing Sunday afternoon domino or Canasta game taking place at the kitchen table. But no one viewed this as a problem. Those playing would put their game on ice, or put it all away for later, and they and their surprise guests would make their way to the living room to visit.
It was a different time then. Certainly, the pace was slower. But it was more a difference in attitude in that folks didn’t regard Sunday as just another day of the week. For sure, you’d never have caught my Granny doing her shopping at Safeway on Sunday’s. No, Ma’am. Sundays were special. Sundays were reserved for morning church and big lunches and gathering family and playing games. And if some of the family that dropped in were unexpected, well, so much the better.
As my brother and I were making our way down to call on Daddy today, I was thinking about my grandparent’s unexpected Sunday visitors all those years ago — and how now, every guest Daddy receives is an unexpected visitor. Like a child, Dad has lost his ‘poker face’ skills, for Dad always wears that slightly befuddled look when he first sees us — rather than pretending to know who we are.
But today, Dad was actually at home. And not just physically. Daddy pointed his finger at objects, his way of giving us his commands — like when he wanted to go to the bathroom, or be put into his recliner. Daddy flipped through the newspaper I brought — and he really read a article on the sports page. And as my brother and I were having a conversation about our favorite Frank Sinatra tunes, Daddy followed our conversation, shaking his head in memory of songs he liked too.
I also told Daddy that his granddaughter Abigail turned sixteen today; “Daddy, can you believe today is Abigail’s sixteenth birthday?” And just like it was nothing special, Daddy shook his head ‘no’, in the wonder of it all. And, of course, it was so incredibly special that Daddy shook his head at all, because in his shaking, Daddy connected with me in a moment of wonder that was, in and of itself, as wonderful as what we both wondered at together.
Our visit was exactly what a surprise Sunday visit should be: The host received the treat of surprised guests and we, his guests, found our host home. And like two little pigs who’d gone to market, my brother and I celebrated our good fortune all the way back home.
And then, because we all have to come back to earth and reality sooner or later, my brother asked me to take him to the market so he could buy a few groceries. And though I could have picked up a few groceries myself, I decided to sit this one.
After all, why ruin a perfectly good Sunday with grocery shopping?
an everyday life 