Beyond the cutest of walks between home and town—okay, you could insert Herrell’s for town on more than one occasion—and this week’s trip to a truly empty Holyoke Canoe Club, where we did not share the pool with anyone else for an hour, I guess there’s been a bit more going on. Yoga! Work! Thinking about teenagers! Peeling the skin off peaches!
Having culled books—a tome tour through my college years and twenties, before kids and long before Facebook or the interwebs and back when just buying books seemed a reasonable regular activity—from my shelves to make room for more books not on shelves, I’ve had to figure out what to do with these no longer shelved volumes. Sam Burton from Grey Matter Books took a goodly pile. One friend took a vacation-plus’ worth to read. The rest are off to Reader to Reader, where they will find homes in communities without budgets for library acquisitions. That’s reuse of the finest order.
Last night, I put a box together for the rigid plastic recycling day in September. That may have been penance for the junk I ended up tossing in the garbage bag, small pieces of plastic toy miscellany and other playroom detritus. I’ve pretty painstakingly gotten like with like this past year: Lego to Lego, Playmobil to Playmobil, which sounds easy and obvious but the playroom was guided by some other force called entropy. I don’t know enough about such things really to be sure but I’m pretty certain entropy isn’t something easily arrested.
Ever since Al Gore took up residence on my shoulder in the Inconvenient Truth era, I can’t look at my playroom or my house for that matter without incredible guilt at all this unnecessary, excess crap.
While I’ve obtained far less unnecessary, excess crap ever since, the cleaning the house part has gotten harder in a way. I hate landing things in the garbage bag/landfill.
Part of the house cleanse involves sending things to the garbage bag/landfill.
I’ve culled outgrown clothing, offloaded clothing, and excess toys to other people, too, and moved around clothing and toys in the house, gotten the toddler bed moved and a real bed in Saskia’s room in anticipation of a bedroom reshuffle. I’m offloading games, puzzles and things of that ilk. Things are still a mess. However, they are less of a mess.
**
I peeled the skin off peaches to make peach jam. Yield: four jars, plus a bit. I am calling my first ever peach jam precious peach jam. I think the peach jam sums up something about this little window in time: the productivity, in the form of tossing and rearranging feels ultimately very sweet and gem-hued.
