Weekend Things

Yes, I know Halloween wasn't technically the weekend, but we operate on a bit of a delay around here.

This year I was a total Halloween slacker, and brought home an armload of black sweatsuits from Old Navy that the boys wore with their demon ski masks (which my sister brought back from Peru a couple of years ago), along with various capes, cloaks and light-up glasses from the dress-up bin. It rained Halloween night, so we couldn't do our traditional hay wagon ride. Instead C took the boys and their friend N and his dad around in the Volvo and my friend T and I hung out at home and drank wine and made some of these caramels (because, apparently, I am incapable of sitting around doing nothing, and because they are delicious).

I had big plans for the weekend––trips to the unfinished furniture store, and cleaning, sorting, switching out summer clothes for winter clothes, but then a friend of mine invited me to a craft fair. And then, when I told the boys to go clean their room in preparation for the organizing, M went upstairs and started writing a song, E decided to teach himself to play the piano, and Z went down to the basement to play drums. Who am I to put housework ahead of art?

I took my camera along to the craft fair, but I was too shy to take pictures of the lovely wares there.

Afterward, we went for a walk in nearby park and out for a drink (I had lemonade, because I think I've figured out that alcohol seriously interferes with my sleep).

On Sunday, E taught Z what he'd learned on the piano the day before ("Mary Had a Little Lamb"). Yes, these are the boys who were fighting like wolverines last week.

I love the day we switch back to Standard Time. I purposely don't set the clocks back, so that every time I look at the clock, I get little jolt of surprise as I subtract an hour. Instead of it being twenty minutes to noon and I'm still vacuuming, it's barely ten-thirty and I'm almost done vacuuming. It's the one day a year I become a glass-half-full sort of person, and each mental rewind of the clock is a little reprieve, a temporary stay of execution, holding Monday morning off just a little longer.

Sunday afternoon, C took the boys out on a project he had to work on and I had the house to myself for a little while.Last week, I was talking to a friend about the noise in my house, and she said, "But it's quiet when there aren't voices, right?"

She meant that we don't have the TV or radio running as background noise all the time, which is true, but it is almost never quiet. Five voices make a lot of noise, not to mention two electric guitars, a mandolin, a piano, a drum set, a record player.

Nope. Almost never quiet.

When all those noise-makers got home Sunday evening, I went for a walk down to the river in the darkening evening, to find that November is really putting in an appearance around here.