Free to Good Home

Nothing quite says "kids live here" like a bare spot in the backyard that can be seen from space. That said, there's also nothing quite like the squeal of kids playing in the pool on a summer afternoon. For two summers we set up a 15-foot-diameter above-ground pool that looks like this one (that's our pool, but those totally aren't the Gentiles). But now my kids tell me they're too old for it. What does that make me?

Gone are the days when water of any type attracted my kids like a magnet. Even though within the last week they came home from the woods and had to change out of wet clothes because they were jumping in the creek in back of the house, they're in that period of time when they are too old for something that grownups wish they could do. How many pictures do I have of my kids playing in puddles on Kwajalein? It's a rhetorical question, but let me tell you: a lot.

The pool sat unused in the shed all last summer, and I hate the thought of this perfectly fine thing sitting idle, not earning its keep, for another summer almost as much as I hate the thought of keeping the snowblower in the garage for one more summer because there's no room for it in the shed, what with the garage door being broken by the whitewater in the yard during the flood, but that's a story for another time.

So if you would like an above-ground pool for your very own for the very reasonable price of you-make-some-memories, let me know and we'll set up an exchange. Seriously. I want to get rid of the pool.

Two Months

April 7. It's been two months since Tom died. Today Boston will have the warmest temperatures it has seen since September 2009, and I used  the morning to throw some grass seed on some bare spots in the lawn and plant the peas I should have planted a week ago (they like it a little cool while they're germinating).

In every previous year, the day we started the garden was long and frantic. We would already have made at least a couple of trips to Home Depot for peat and manure and fertilizer and whatever else normally goes into the garden. Then on the first warm dry day, Tom would pull out the rototiller and turn the whole garden over and work all that stuff into the soil, and every year he would ignore my protests that we don't need to rototill every year. This year, I planted the peas without tilling first. Admittedly and not inconsequentially, I don't know how to turn the tiller on. Even if I did, I wouldn't have tilled this year, because the garden doesn't need it. But this year I don't have anyone to fight with about it.

Who would have thought I'd miss fighting with Tom? Tom and I both liked to have the last word in an argument, and God knows we argued often. I was clearly superior at getting that last muttered "harumph" in just as he was smugly turning to leave, thinking he had just had The Last Word. That just-under-the-wire harumph would always get a smile out of him. But then he'd go and rototill anyway.

Today I don't hear the rototiller or the table saw. Lights are left on, returnable cans collect in bags, waiting to be redeemed. Circulars are recycled, coupons unclipped. I watch the Daily Show, or Colbert,  or something science-y on Tivo, and I won't delete it, thinking, "Ooh, I have to save this for Tom".

And then I remember. His absence fills every corner of every room, and everywhere I look, Tom's not there.