I introduced my wife to binge-watching. Orange is the New Black is the perfect first-time binge-watch. I love re-watching, too. Takes me right back to days when M was a baby and I’d put her down for the night and watch it on my phone until 3 am. All the old Alex and Piper feels. I never made it past season 5, so maybe this time I will.
The one thing we got to do outside of the house, in months, was rained on. But we did it anyway. We went cherry-picking! By the way, it never rains here. But naturally it rained that day. We saw it through, though, and ended up with 26 lbs of cherries. If you didn’t know, that equals about 18 pies. I’m so not making 18 pies.
I’m so excited to go home, sit on the dock, watch the sun set, feel the breeze, listen to the whispers of everything that has happened within me. I know they are there. Sometimes I feel my lake whispering to me, sending me blasts of damp leaf fall wind, or intensely silent snow-soaked nights. I hear the chirp of birds on sunny, early mornings when the lake is like glass, and it feels like anything at all is possible. Then the hot, slow and lazy summer afternoons, grass mowers droning and jet skis whining. I taste Miller Light and hear water rhythmically lapping at shore, my feet immersed in cool waves. I feel younger, and immensely old.
Sometimes I fantasize that I can buy back my grandma’s house, now that it’s all fixed up. We’d raise our kids on the hillside, building snowmen in winter, eating pears from great-great grandfather’s pear tree in the summer. We’d buy eggs from down the street, we’d spend mornings fishing for minnows, we’d have our homeschool sessions under the shade of the maple. The Christmas tree would be set up in the living room where generations had their Christmas mornings. I’d hear the house settling at night as the moon shone in from the South West through the old parlor windows. This fantasy makes me feel tremendously whole and, as joy rises from my inner being, I take a deep breath. It would be stunningly perfect, but so would a great many things. Life is never as we hope, and often better than we plan. Let’s see what the future actually brings.
Mother of All Things 