I'm hoping you had a good weekend. I did something completely different than usual this weekend....I did nothing. Not nothing really, but I did try to do as I said I would and live more in the moment.
What I did do was spend a lot of time on porches. I am so happy that winter is over. Winter this past year was really hard on me. Do you get those wintertime doldrums? So it was a real pleasure to spend some time this weekend sitting outside with loved ones. Saturday I went to visit my parents. My brother and his girlfriend were home and so for a few hours we sat on my Mom's porch and talked (my mother, Claire and I) my brother and my step-father tended to flit in and out of the conversation. We didn't have that porch ( a long, concrete open one, that runs the length of the house) when I was growing up. It is a new after the children grow up and move away addition. My brother, the youngest, is twenty-four and works for a newspaper about three hours away. He was the second marriage child, thus I am fifteen years older than he. I used to read him The Many Adventures of Winnie-The-Pooh long before I read them to my own children. I have a special kind of attachment to him.
When I decided I had lollygagged enough at my mother's I came home with good intentions to get to work. That is until I saw my Grandmother sitting on her porch. A small wooden porch just big enough for a wooden swing on the side of their house facing mine. I walked up so we could fret over my Grandfather who was working way too hard in the heat (he refuses to admit he is living in his eighth decade). So I sat with her until my Grandfather finally gave up, plopped on a step with us and I listened to them talk about when they were younger (something I could do for days, let alone hours).
Finally I went home and did a bit of laundry, a quick trip to the grocery and went to pick the girls up at their father's. When we got home about nine p.m. they settled in to watch a movie and as I bustled around the kitchen I realized a storm was coming in. Now one of my favorite things in the world is to watch thunderstorms coming (is it a stupid question to ask if you get thunderstorms, they must be a worldwide phenomenon right?) I poured myself a glass of wine and went and sat on my own front porch, wooden, wide, pots of herbs and seashells from vacation running along the sides. I watched the fireflies (ok, fireflies? yes or no?) in the field compete with the heat of the lightning in the sky and felt the temperature drop about ten degrees with the coming breeze. I stayed out until the rain came down and the thunderclaps became too loud for the girls and the scaredy-cat dog to be by themselves.
Sunday, I had to suffer the consequences of goofing off so much and went to work doing the cleanup around the house in the morning. By late morning the girls and I commited to one of our happy rituals of warmer weather, snapping beans on (of course) the porch. Do you get any more country than that? I have to tell you I am just happy to have children who value where their food comes from (in this case our Amish farmers down the road, I have the evil black thumb) and think that an afternoon splitting open pea pods is a good time. Exclamations of "This one is stuffed"and "Eight, eight in this one"!! Karelyn gave up about three-quarters of the way through and chose instead to sit in a chair and read poems from a library book to Emily and I instead of snapping, but so it goes. Regardless, we ate through that hard work this evening.
Maybe someday you can come and share the pleasures of our porches with us. They are nothing grand or ornate, simple concrete or wood, a few flowers here and there. Sometimes it's a bit hot, or the bugs get a bit bothersome, but something about it calls when the weather warms. It is a nice place to be together, shelling peas, watching a rainstorm, debating local politics or reliving well-lived memories. It seems a perfect simple pleasure and a perfect weekend way to live in the moment.
