Waves

An ordinary day. I always want to have something exciting to say at the end of the day, but mostly I do ordinary things. This morning, for instance, I made a big pot of chili for an upcoming camping trip; it's an interesting recipe, with a bottle of beer, some strong black coffee and a hefty shot of Sriracha. Then I did a batch of laundry and hung it outside; that's a highlight--I love the smell of the clothes and the flowers and the wind all hung together with clothespins, both the old-fashioned peg kind and the new-fangled springs. I went to knitting, where we talked about buttons and abortion and a local shooting and how to cast on stitches within a row. The afternoon, which I meant to spend out in the garden, somehow got consumed with scanning my son's old school photos, those composite shots with a whole class of small faces arranged in a grid. Why did I do that today? I don't know. The folder 's been siting on my desk for at least a year, after I took apart one of those old albums made from nasty stained magnetic plastic that destroys the prints; I can remember how popular those albums were, how easy it was to display photos when you didn't have to glue down four little corners. Scanning. Of course I had to play with the color a bit to see if I could make them look decent. And I got a little lost looking at all those vaguely familiar children from years ago. My son, however, seems able to identify almost all the kids, even after forty years. He still knows most of them. That's what happens when you stay put. I've got all my school pix, but I haven't thought about most of those people since I left grammar school, since I left town, since I got filled up with another life.