Saint Pickle

Today we spent most of the day packing up for our move. David and I concentrated our efforts in the garage. We now have all the items out of the rafters and all the items that were being stored in the garage are pretty much packed up, organized and ready to go. Among the boxes on our shelves were a few boxes of things that I brought from my mom's house when we emptied out her house after her death. These boxes weren't well labeled at the time I packed them so because of the mass amount of boxes we would be dealing with in our move, I felt it was necessary to label these boxes. Of course, I needed to check out the contents of each of these boxes. I rediscovered a metal box that I placed inside one of the larger boxes. Inside the metal box I placed several mementos that belonged to both my mom and dad - report cards, awards, and even my dad's baby book. As I was flipping through the box I realized that it smelled like my mom's house did, albeit the way her basement smelled, but it was definitely a scent from my mom's house. I probably sniffed that stuff for 10 minutes but then decided I should quickly put it back the way I stored it all in order to hopefully preserve the scent.

In addition to our own moving preparations, there are other moving preparations going on at this household as well. Every year for the past several years we would have two broods of barn swallows (one in May and one in July) build a nest on our front porch. In spring, we decided to remove the perch on our porch that welcomed the visitors. Luckily we did, as it would've been a hoot to have an open house to try to sell our house while having protective nesters. So, we did not have "tenants" in early summer yet, one lone bird would sleep on one of our porch posts in the evening. For the past couple weeks, the lone bird was gone. I believe he was helping the birdy mama with nesting babies elsewhere. Now, he is back and building a next in the area that he would sleep each night....grrrrrrr, we are torn. We don't want to disturb our anticipated visitors but, boy, it'll be fun trying to move out with the new "tenants'" nursery on our front porch!

Finally, later in the afternoon, I think David and I were just plain old getting silly after all the work. We were both in the midst of taking items out of our landscaping and organizing some outdoor toys. We spontaneously began playing some Frisbee. Of course, I needed to free up my hands from the statue of St. Francis that I was carrying out of our landscaping. I decided (warped as it is) to play "pickle in the middle" with St. Francis. So, as Madeline played with the neighbor kids, Mama and Papa stood on opposite sides of our front yard, playing Frisbee with "St. Pickle" in between us (video below)