It's been HOT. Really, really hot for Maine. Annabel and I have been spending the early mornings in the garden and outside making sure the animals are plenty shaded and watered. In the hottest hours of the day, we've been adventuring (mostly centered around ice cream, and I'm totally indulging her in that), and doing some puttering around the house. Thank goodness for those wise farmers who made this house two hundred years ago - they certainly knew what they were doing when they built this house facing the way it does. It's fairly cool during the day, and that makes for a fairly comfortable respite from the sun. Annabel has been my sidekick for a bit of rearranging and tidying up. Not so much as a helper, but as a storyteller at my side. And really, that's helpful too. Better than any audiobook, her tales and questions and stories.
Last week we did some bedroom rearranging, after Bruce's departure. Part of that rearrange means that my sewing things all landed in the little nook at the top of the stairs. While a closed studio door (that locked!) was perfect for my sewing for a good long while, now our family life has evolved and grown in a way that I don't mind sewing in the open, and it's so much nicer for inviting people in to help me. Or to talk with me, as the case usually is. I'm still getting settled in there, I need to figure out some shelving, but it's getting closer and I'm already feeling that familiar itch to make things that comes with a proper clearing out and rearrange. Change is so good!
Looking for ways in which to still harvest garden work, but not turn on the stove....I bottled up the chive vinegar this week, among a few other herbal concoctions soaking and resting and bottled here there and everywhere. That chive vinegar is so beautifully purple! I love it!
Pop took advantage of this week, when the dinner table need not seat the usual seven - or more likely - ten, by taking the kitchen table apart for a refresh. He sanded all those old barn boards one more time, and stained them (Vermont Natural Coatings, we love you!), and put it all back together, so that somehow I feel like this table - with its hundreds of years old boards - that I've had for years now, feels new and fresh. That feels good. He even tackled our round oak art table, and that feels like an entirely different one now, rid of years of paint and glue. Ready for working on in pockets of time during this quiet week....and surely ready for more paint and glue to come. (He says the glitter was hard to get off. We are united in our distrust of glitter.)
Ah. The blessing of a quiet week with my little girl in the middle of a busy season. What a gift!
