Sometimes when I walk up the stairs, I rub my fingers extra hard over the handrail--feeling the edges, gliding smoothly along the top. It’s nice to really notice that it’s there. Now that it’s there. I don’t want to ever take the house’s details for granted, now that they’re there. The doors bear looking at. So do the floors. So does the porch railing.
Yesterday, at Spring cleanup day at our beach, Jeff and I got bench duty. We’ve got a whole fleet of benches at the beach, and I have no idea how old they are, but they’re comprised of two concrete frame/leg pieces--one for each end--straddled by seven bolted-on 2x4s. A couple years ago, when several needed new slats, someone decided to try the new plastic lumber. The recycled coke bottle, or plastic bag, stuff. It warped within the first season. So, armed with a drill, a tape measure, and our circular saw, we set to work on the fresh, pressure-treated pile of lumber. We were into the cutting to length part when Jeff had to leave for his sax lesson. Then, forgetting I suppose, that it might be useful to come back, he spent the rest of the day puttering in the basement. As for me--I was intensely grateful not to be doing mulching or beach-raking, and it was quite interesting to field the reactions of neighbors who weren’t used to group efforts of this sort where a woman got the power tool job. But I cut, measured, drilled, and bolted--tweaking a hole here or there where the fit wasn’t exact--and now I am dang proud of those three benches with the fresh green, newly installed lumber. I hope everyone will sit on them at least once.
I think I’m learning to appreciate Namenda. Surely we are living on borrowed time--and time still marked by patchy memory function--but things are pretty good, and who can argue with that?
Jeff’s mom is 85. She called us with “the best news” two nights ago. One always worries when she calls with the best news. Sometimes it means that we are as rich as the Rockefellers--something she has just realized, and sometimes it means that she’s buying her entire 2000+ resident retirement complex where she will reign as queen. This time it was because she’d had the revelation that her dysfunctional, emphysemic lungs need trouble her no longer. She’ll simply have a lung transplant. After all, lung transplants are as common as pulling teeth these days, right? What could I say but “I guess you can ask your doctor about that.” Oh, she would, she assured me.
Tomorrow looks like a good canoe day. I will wear sunscreen.
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