Right now it is still the beginning of the day. Still the beginning of the weekend. Still the opening of these two wide-open spaces in the calendar of my life. I love my job, but I dearly love these days each week to be at home, to be with family, to wear comfortable clothes and do what I like.
Every Saturday morning, Bill and I try to list what needs to happen, and the list varies. Already today the boys have swept the front porch and path to the driveway and have taken a shot at raking the backyard. They have stripped their beds of their sheets and have emptied the dishwasher.
I have started a load of laundry, found (Oh Joy!) my two-weeks-missing attachments for the vacuum, ushered two antique bed-frames and a toy chest out the door with some gentlemen from Habitat for Humanity (they wouldn’t take the sofa– it was That Bad), and begun taking down the decorations from Emma Grace’s birthday party last week.
Now Bill is at Emma’s ballet lesson, and shortly I’ll run Everett to the store to buy a gift for the birthday party he’ll be attending later. I also have to dig Will’s baseball pants out of their storage bin, as he’ll head to try-outs this early afternoon. And within a half hour, my parents will arrive.
So I’ll be putting clean sheets on the bed for them, which means I need to get back to the laundry. The entire house needs a good vacuuming (more joy over the attachments) and the downstairs bathroom could use some attention. I have a lot of grading I need to do for my dear students, and I should also give some thought to lessons for this week and next. And at some point, I’d like to start writing up some instructions for my parents-in-law, who will be staying with the children when Bill and I go away (Away!) next week.
Also on the agenda would be to (finally) put in the mail the Christmas-thank-you notes that my children wrote two weeks ago and to get Emma to write her thank-you’s from her birthday celebration; both of these chores would require my opening my desk, and the cascade of paper to floor that will ensue from this small effort might have me organizing and sorting things for awhile.
Oh, and I also want (of course) to go for a walk (maybe with my dad?) and to make some soup: corn chowder.
But right now, here at the beginning, I am sitting in the breakfast room, looking out the window. The winter light falls in its sidelong way along bare branches. Despite the cold, birds sing from time to time. And the sun, streaming its 93 million miles into my backyard, makes the paper leaves of the beech trees turn to almost gold.
