I spent a week at my parents house helping them get things ready to sell it. This involved a bunch of cleaning and fixing little things around the house.A thought that keeps popping up( when you are an adult) is that you only finish the things on your house list when you are getting ready to sell the house. All those things that you put up with and put off are only addressed when you have that deadline. Or is it that you take care of the things when you know those outside critics are coming to look at your home? It may be a bit of both, that you are happy accommodating the nicks, scrapes and blemishes when it is your home, but need to clean them up, make it more presentable (to stage the rooms) to appeal to the person off the street. One of the things was a knob on the built in linen cabinet was missing. All the knob were glass, with a single one replaced with a ceramic knob from the old kitchen cabinets (the originals that were replaced in the 1980’s). When sorting thru the boxes in the attic, there was the glass knob, waiting 40 years to be put back in its place. Just waiting for the person with the will to finish this task off the list.

How much of our own personal, internal todo lists do we put off for other concerns? I kick a lot of things farther down on the list, in order to take care of other things. Is that similar to this? When are those looming deadlines for internal todo lists? And do we ever see them coming?

Now all the knobs match for the next owners of the house. Maybe it’s time for me to check my own list for something to finish…

Sometimes hearing a song just takes me back to my room in my parents house. Hearing the sound come out of the one plastic wood paneled speaker of the G.I. Joe’s sticker covered clock radio cassette player.

Waiting to hit record at the right time to get your favorite song of the radio. Always missing the first moment of it. but then you have that crackly copy to listen to whenever you want. And that made it valuable.

Putting on a Fitbit means I keep getting reminders About getting up and needing to move. It has made me realize how much of my job involves sitting and thinking slash typing at a computer.and how much of my usual day was getting up and walking around though and how much of my usual day was getting up and walking around the Lenfest center. It has been good to find the time to walk in these new days. And seeing less people on the sidewalks has me looking around more. Here are some pictures of flowers I have seen in this spring turning to summer time.

This a great time of the year, season wise. Mid-May in this era of Virginia mean it’s not too hot yet. The days can get very warm, where wearing shorts gets you to the ideal balance with the weather. And at nighttime, it gets nice and cool. A slight chill deep in the middle of the night. Where the cool breeze coming in from the open windows means you need blanket to snuggle under. And with the windows open the sounds of the neighborhood roll in. At night you can kind of hear your next door neighbors in their yards, chatting or working. But at this moment, when I am waking just after the sun has risen, but before I usually wake up, the dominant noise are birds. Bird calls from a bunch of different types. Loud and insistent, taking control of the day that is beginning. Sustained trills, rhythmic tweets, calls for food by babies in nests. This is their moment, before the humans start their racket. So loud, you wonder how you could have been sleeping through it. It is good to wake up to. It be reminded that we are part of a larger system. That is around you whether or not you notice it.

It was so loud. The storm rattled the roof so much I was picturing the repairs as I opened my eyes. The rain whipped against the windows. It was not yet light out, so the room was dim. And one of the first things I noticed was that the numbers of the alarm clock were dark.

As the rain slowed to a stop, I noticed the usual background noises of the house were absent. The power was out.

With the ongoing pandemic, I wonder how long the power outage would last. Usually the power is out for minutes or hours. But this could be longer.

The house is silent as I search. All the CDs are in the garage, and We can’t play records without power. We got rid of the radios because their reception was horrible, it was better to just to stream NPR online.

But I found what I was looking for in the third drawer from the bottom. It seemed like a silly gift at the time, but the hand cranked radio was finally going to have its moment.

Isn’t this a sign of the times we are in right now? There have been times where all five of us are either on a video conference or watching a video of a lesson.

Ann put it right, the WiFi is the weakest link in this situation.

With the onset of the social distancing, the family has been at home for what is now 2 weeks. It is interesting how a routine can be thrown to the wind. We used to have a decent process of tidying up and cleaning during the regular school week. But now that school is online and at home, we haven’t found a new routine yet.

When we were in LA in 2017, we had a smaller house and an everyone at home routine that included tidying. Back in Lexington it has been harder to create a new routine in the old environment. Luckily Ann and I have a similar level of tolerance for clutter.

Looking out my front window this morning I was greeted with a gorgeous sight. In our front lawn is a weeping cherry tree. So this time of year it is in bloom with pink flowers. And due to the slope of our property, we look directly into its branches.

The spring is a great time at our house because of the flowering trees and bushes we have. Now I didn’t plant any of them. They were all here when we first looked at the place. The previous owners had planted them. They invariably had thought carefully about what to grow and where they should go. I don’t how much they thought about what future owners would think about their choices. But they set about creating a view they would want to see.

And this morning as I was grateful for what I had, I also realized that I should be grateful for what had been passed down and given. For the previous owners had, by creating the world they wanted to see outside their window, had given me what I enjoy as well. And they have reminded me that the choices we make today, create the world we live in tomorrow.