The old dance

This past Saturday was as perfect an instance of the oft-noted dance of entropy and flux as can be imagined. For starters, it must be owned, the weather was lovely.  And after ferrying Natalie to field hockey and then Graham to martial arts, where he tussled with a neighbor boy who's a year older than him and I worked up the strength to approach his seemingly ultra-shy mom, we settled back into the homestead.

There, I did battle.  First, with pollen on the screen porch.  For the second time this year, I took the big-assed push broom out there and nudged the yellow stuff around.  That helped a little, made me a big old pile of pollen.  Then I brought the hose in there, put it on the "jet" setting, and tried to wash the stuff through the cracks of the deck.  That seemed to help, but upon closer inspection, mostly it got everything wet.  When it dried an hour or so later -- and the cats were practically clawing at the door to get out there on the porch, but I didn't want them all drippy -- there were the little yellow dots again.  Pollen. So I swept again.

And then some light composting, and the collection of kindling and the making of small piles, in squirrel-like preparation for winter.  Next, a little basement organizing.

At last it was time to sit in the chair I found on the street a year and change ago that Mary really doesn't like much, to drink iced coffee and scroll through my phone looking for friends I hadn't talked to in a while, and then to actually make those calls that I am always saying I should make.

Meanwhile, Graham was having a friend over and they -- and this was maybe an all-time historic first -- did not go in the house at all.  They were over in the ravine, then did a little excavating in the back yard, then went all the way down to the creek.

Textbook, I tell ya.