We both needed a day off from... well... everything today. I'm fairly certain our biggest accomplishment was showering and dressing by midday. No, wait, I'm being unfair. The Mr mowed the front yard, and watered the flower pots up there. That beats anything productive I did. My day was spent limping around the house, complaining about how sore I was, and sitting still, wasting a million and a half points on a tablet slot machine game. I did what I really needed to do, which was recover, and I can't forget that this is an important part of my life. It just makes me feel like a slug to admit that I do it.
When the sun went down, as per usual, I started to perk up. All of the things I told myself I would do once I felt like moving around remain undone. I never delivered the half case of peaches I promised my daughter. I never researched football players for the live draft tomorrow. I sat in my chair and just sat. As the warm late summer air gave way to cooler night air, the smells in my living room changed into something far more familiar. There is something comforting to me in the warm attic smell that sometimes makes its way down through cold air returns and unused air conditioning vents. I smell this in homes with whole house fans too. It reminds me of being upstairs in the Oklahoma house where I grew up. That place was old even when I was a kid, and it was poorly insulated and drafty as a barn. I loved it, with the chilly winter nights, and the sticky hot days that smelled of dusty attic. I loved the deafening rattle of the whole house fan, that sucked in the smells of sweet grass and ragweed and the insecticide the city sprayed on bag worms in our pecans trees (and everyone else's trees up and down the street). Tonight, as I sat still and paid attention, the warm attic air took me home, if only for five minutes, to my upstairs room.
I had very few impulses to take photos this weekend, so again I snapped what was in front of me as I started to write. I rarely compose on the iPad. The keyboard is awkward for me. But it has a camera on it, so I held it up and tried to get the attention of Alfred and Rabbit. I looked at the photo album afterwards, and was shocked to learn that some old videos I deleted years ago to save space on the old iPad still exist in the cloud (now that I'm paying for enough storage to function). I found video of baby Athena on the day she learned that she could run down the stairs to find me in the old house, rather than simply screaming pitifully from the catwalk, to where I sat below. I found video of Alfred playing with his favorite toy from years ago: "Birdie." It was from Target, and chirped distinctively when tossed around. As soon I played it, he jumped up from the floor in front of me, and started looking for it. Birdie's battery died out before we moved to this house. I wish I could conjure up a new toy just like it, to make him as happy as Birdie did. He was so excited to hear that blast from his past, just as I was to smell my old bedroom, for an instant. It was just something in the air tonight.
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