This is the first weekend in many that I am able to spend at home with hardly anything on the schedule. I cannot tell you how excited I am about this fact.
Our forsythia bushes that we planted last summer are in full bloom, and I love the branches loaded with yellow flowers so much I want to plant a several more. Flowers are pretty all summer long, but the ones I appreciate most are the ones that pop open in very early spring. They are such a fresh change of place from the dead brown that has been everywhere for weeks and weeks. It’s the same reason I love crocuses and daffodils and tulips.
Here are some reasons why living where I live is never dull: This year in Duluth we have had two wolves wandering around a forested city park not far from my house. You might recall a few years ago how I met three bears while walking in the woods. This week a black bear lumbered down the Lakewalk, strolled down the pier of the ship canal, and took up residence in a tree right next to city hall downtown. It rested there almost all day. It ambled across the entrances to the courthouse. It rambled around the civic building grounds and then headed up a second tree. And because it is Duluth, and we just roll with it, people for the most part just took a few pictures and went on about their business. You can read about it in this newspaper article.
Mr. Trouble on Feet is so excited to play soccer during the month of June. He kicks around a soccer ball in the yard for the better part of pretty much every afternoon. We have lots of friends in the neighborhood who play soccer, and they all gave him their old, outgrown soccer jerseys, which means he can dress like an official soccer star every single day of the week and never wear the same uniform twice.
Last weekend a package of sticky notes got stuck in my piano. I think it was an accident on the part of one of the kidlets, but I’m really not sure how it happened since there are four differing stories about how they managed to get inside the piano. Unfortunately the sticky notes were lodged in a way that hampered the action of several keys, and since the piano tuner couldn’t come to take apart the piano until Friday, it was an interesting music teaching week. On Tuesday afternoon Dr. Peds managed to use a snake-like metal grabber to get down behind the fall board, and with a lot of effort snatched out not one package of sticky notes, but two, along with three pencils and two markers. It’s always an adventure here.
Brutus is back to leaving presents for his favorite people. YaYa woke up a few weeks ago to a shoe smeared with blood and guts and the head of a mouse deposited near the toe. The shoes were lined with fuzzy material, and she elected to just toss them in the garbage, which is saying a lot because that girl never throws anything away.
Before we left for Minneapolis last weekend, I helped Mr. TOF pack his suitcase. He was so excited to go to the cities he was practically bouncing off the walls. About a half hour later, he came marching into my office where I was working on paying the bills, with a proud smile and two enormous fistfuls of my purple crocuses. “Here, Mom! These are for YOU! Thanks for helping me pack my suitcase!” I gave him a big hug and put the crocuses in a glass of water. I didn’t even feel bad that he had picked every last one because the memory of how proud and happy he was to be giving me fistfuls of crocuses is just WAY too good. His heart was beaming and it was pretty much the sweetest thing ever. It brings me joy just to think about it.
After the cousins left here, there was a glut of laundry. When I was redoing all the beds, some of the blankets got stuck in the laundry shoot. This is not overly unusual, and it has happened enough times that i know now eventually the laundry will work its way down to the basement. So, I don’t panic. I just keep putting laundry in the shoot, stuffing it in until it all falls out at once in the basement. You can stuff a lot of laundry in two floors of laundry chute. Since I already had multiple heaping baskets of laundry to wash that was already in the basement, I thought it rather fortunate that I would be able to work my way through that laundry before more dropped down to the basement floor. A few days later Dr. Peds scrambled around the house and finally grouchily asked if I’d seen a certain pair of his pants. I said no. Then I had to admit that they might be clogged up in the laundry chute. I cheerfully reassured him that the pants would reappear in a few days. His response was one of disbelief. Since he needed something out of the pants pockets right away, he immediately went about attacking the laundry chute with brooms and pinchy grabbers, coaxing the clothes down and out. Later he remarked, “Your Grandma Jan would have really appreciated that trick. It’s right up there with throwing the pans she didn’t want to wash over the backyard fence and claiming the dog ate them.” It’s true, she would have stored laundry in the laundry chute if she could have. I know it. But for the record, I was intending to wash that laundry . . . just later.
The best way to listen to classical music is LOUD. I’ve always known this. The sound envelops you, and you become part of the music. Classical music was never meant to serve as cheesy background music in shopping centers, or to be piped into your phone when you are on hold. My husband did not know this about me, that I listen to music loudly. This is partly because the music takes up so much space in my head that I don’t often listen to it when he’s around; there isn’t room for people and the music. The other day I came in from a walk with headphones in my ears, blaring away. He removed the headphones. “That was loud. Really loud.” “The best way to listen to classical music is loud,” I said. He looked and me and stated, “I don’t know how I am going to explain to the E.R. about how you were run over by a truck because you were walking with headphones on full volume listening to the Brahms Requiem.”
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