The drive home is perfection. Fifteen minutes of decompression time. By the time I turn on to CR 232, time has shifted. When I pass NW 170th and the live oak branches roof the two lane road, I feel the tension ebbing away. This week I will have a curbside refuse container with pick up. This is progress, people. This morning, I woke to a serious storm. Lightening and thunder and heavy, heavy rain. I had to wear my rain boots.
Every time the lightening struck, my house phone rang because my Windstream phone line lies on the ground, upon the grass. Even lightening three Mississippi’s away caused the phone to ring. It was a game of Heavenly crank calling.
It was still raining this evening when I drove home, but by the time I pulled into the driveway, it was just sprinkling. I sat on the rear porch and drank a silent glass of Riesling before putting on my work boots and gloves to drag all the branches cut last week from the bottom layers of all my trees. This was a chore I had not intended to be doing but over the last week, the branches have all turned brown and I am sick of looking at them scattered around the bases of all my oaks like hastily disrobed clothes. People say, “Now you have a big burn pile.” But, I am not eager to ignite the mound. I don’t want some backyard inferno that I think I can control with a garden hose. Plus I think the mound is a Club Med for all manner of creatures. But now the branches are consolidated and I can sit on the back porch in the morning and watch the sunrise without the nagging, mocking chorus of browning branches on the ground from fence to road.
My dryer is now fixed and my kitchen sink has been corrected. I had wanted a foot pedal, like in the surgical suite. Hands free on/off for water. The glitch was that I had ONLY a foot pedal. So if I put a pot in the sink to fill for pasta, I had to stand on the pedal to keep the water running. An unexpected outcome. So, I asked the plumber to remove the foot pedal and make the faucet a normal, hand-operated device. How pedantic.
Each little item gets checked off the list. And best of all, tomorrow my boys come home. Home to our new home.