Packin’

I’m packin’ for another get away with Dirt, more of Dirt’s work  conference stuff.   But have no fear, my worker-bees-three are here taking care of the place.  No car, no gas, no license, no place to walk to except Aunty Terry’s across the highway, so they will be here. 

Dirt and I won’t be as far away this time, AJAC, the group who is putting all of this together, has chosen a lovely spot on the Hood Canal for the meeting of the aviation minds.  So I’ll be packin’ up my computer and my web page building books and taking a week away from the work I prefer and hopefully when I get back home we will have a proper web page.  Or resolve that there are some things better left to others to do.  Or that really I can follow a “recipe” and just resolve to use one of the plug-in-your -information web-page-building programs (ugh, shudder, not sure I can go there).

The Hood Canal is beautiful and I don’t remember how long ago it was that we were over there.  Seems to me it was a while ago though, can’t remember if it was two girls or three girls in the car with us.  That is how I come up with my approximate dates of things.  How many girls were still hanging out with us.  I’m not a very good date remember-er.  I should have been a journal-er from day one, but alas I always struggled with my writing.

So I’m leavin’ with a bunch of stuff done and I’m leavin’ with a bunch of stuff undone.  I’m still chiselin’ away at the new office digs.  Trying to figure out where things should go when you don’t have the perfect set up can cause a person to spend a good deal of time holding a tape dispenser in one hand and a stapler in the other and wonder who gets the little bit of “perfect” spot space and who goes in a bottom drawer.

I’m dealing with the same thing down stairs in the kitchen and pantry.  My kitchen has been a mess for a while, too many things on the counter and then everyone just leaves everything on the counter then eh?  Mostly the pantry has been a mess for a while, someone emptied out a cupboard and left all the stuff in boxes on the floor, causing cramped space, causing much toss and go methods.  No mention of names necessary beyond saying that hoping that my random messiness would skip a generation like my mom’s intense neatness apparently did, was wishful thinking.  Apparently messiness can actually increase in subsequent generations without having any throwbacks to the tidy bowl generation.  Rats.

Anyway the pantry was almost finished yesterday in time for dinner guests, luckily the kitchen was back to a fairly reasonable state by the time everyone arrived.  Yet even though things are neat in the kitchen, I still have a lot of work to do as in order to “clean” I had to do a ton of rearranging.

I always do that, a simple clean out can never be simple, it always has to involve a certain level of change, fairly large change.  It is part of the curse of being me, I love, nah, I need change.

The laundry is going, I’m doing a bit of this and that outside before I go.  But one thing I will be doing today for sure… Lying on my office bench upstairs.  It sits at the window.  My mock orange is just below it.  This is a year that I have felt a bit short changed with my mock orange, it blooms in June just about the time we get a good amount of rainy, somewhat chilly, days.  This year was no exception, and in fact was the year to top all years for a rainy May and first of June.  My mock orange needs warmth to bring the fragrance out to its fullest.

But when it does, when the air is perfumed with mock orange, I am eight again.  I am eight again and visiting my Grandpa Pape in Mountain Home, Idaho.  My family went every year in June, up until about the time I was in eighth grade, then it was just my brother and I, the only ones without summer jobs. 

As soon as school was out we would go.  My grandfather’s house was awash in the fragrance of mock orange and when I was about eight my grandparents celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary.  I wore an orange dress with a yellow stripe across the bodice.

Across the alley from my grandparent’s house was the community park, complete with public swimming pool, now that was a pool you could swim in at six in the morning, not quite the same temperature as the public pool at home where my mom always signed me up for the six a.m. session.  Six a.m. in an outdoor pool in the Pacific Northwest the day after school let out?  Yeah, cold.  I learned to swim quickly as the sooner you could actually swim the less time you spent sitting on the ledge, wet, in the rain. I made sure I advanced fast.

I remember only getting out of lessons once, we had a morning thunder and lightening storm come through.  Sometimes my mom would stick around and wait for me.  Sometimes I waited for her.  The waiting area was a covered concrete slab with picnic tables and a long bench along the wire mesh that looked out to the pool.  A lot of the kids who took lessons with me had baby brothers or sisters that would call and wave to them from that bench.  I always wished that I had had a baby brother or sister to call and wave to me.  Sometimes my mom would be looking up and I could get her to wave at me, but it wasn’t quite the same as having someone call to you.

Funny isn’t it, the things we missed out on in our lives? And the things we remember?