booandbunny

It’s funny what summer does to us. I never used to think of it as a busy time, but really, truly it is. It is full of stealing every moment of nothing and squeezing it right out of the season and into your soul.

I mean, no one schedules a squirt gun fight or a day at the public pool or a picnic in the park after a trip to the library. No one blocks out the calendar for early morning cartoons or the wild imagination rides the kids take on a day where the house is sealed to block the heat.

When you’re a kid summer goes too fast. When you’re an adult, at least for me, it seems to go even faster! Who is swiping this season, anyway? Some of their friends, who we had hoped to see this summer, we have missed. Vacations have us in town on opposite schedules. Out-of-town guests keep families hopping. Camp demands keep many of the neighbors busy as the parents are at work. There have been some weeks when it has felt as though we are the only people home. And with our kids gone these past days, our front porch has been an unusually sleepy place. No comings. No goings. Just a container garden wilting in the heat and whipping in the wind.

So Hubby and I made it our goal to pirate every bit of this precious silence, turn it into a secret treasure. We took a night with friends. We snuck some time together. We cooked up a couple of culinary schemes just for the two of us. Then, we plundered our bedroom.

Sounds like a tasty tidbit, I know. But not really.

See, when you’re stealing time back from the clock, it’s about getting something done that you didn’t realize would make you feel just … so good! Again, it sounds like a tasty tidbit but I swear it’s not. The plundering was actually cleaning.

No, not that “cleaning” I do each week, where I change the linen, dust and vacuum. This was C-L-E-A-N-I-N-G. It was the hardcore kind where you pull everything down from the closet and go through it … chuck the toys you said you’d try to fix though you knew they weren’t fixable … make a stack of shirts to give to Goodwill … toss the garments that, really, just are not fit to be worn. It was the kind of cleaning where you pull anything and everything out from under the bed and ask, “What the hell do I have THIS for?” The kind where the paper shredder overheats because you’re cleaning out your files. So, at one point, there was stuff everywhere! It truly looked as though the place had been ransacked.

Until this house we never lived anywhere more than two years, maybe not even that long. So, approaching the sixth anniversary of our arrival here, things have piled up in places and we don’t really think about it. And after today, we feel lighter.

“As long as we don’t reload …” I said to him as we sipped a beer in our nice, clean room … which outwardly doesn’t look a bit different than it did yesterday.

It was just one of those things we knew we had to do, but it never made it onto the calendar. It’s nothing to write about, really, but just another drop of goodness squeezed out of summer. And sometimes those moments … romantic or otherwise … have to be stolen from the humdrum of every day. I can’t slip time in my pocket, but I sure can do my best to keep it from slipping through my fingers. And speaking of pirates, I’m off for a few hours with Johnny and Orlando, oh yeah, and Hubby, too!

// posted by HoBess @ 7/22/2006 03:47:00 PM