Puttering with Jack

Puttering seems to be an old people thing to do.  It seems to indicate not accomplishing much.  Today, it was more about getting quite a lot done, but in a slow, meandering way.

Jack Dear got the groceries bought and stored yesterday, along with the first half of the laundry done.  That meant I had the option of luxuriating over coffee and Words this morning. There was a brief spurt of energetic house cleaning.  Jack hung a few pictures.  I have been poking around in the kitchen, making bread and prepping food for the rest of the week.  A little more laundry was finished.  I finally got all of the past year's bills and records stored away.  Jack made a wooden house for some of Bell's toy animals.  ( this was my project - Jack rescued me when I was in  over my head). I will paint it later.

What I really needed, though, was time to do all of it as whim struck, rather than having to go at a list in a dead run all day.  Thanks to Jack, that is exactly what happened.  I had time to do the work, but I also had time to read up on pumpkin planting.  I window shopped at J. Peterman and read some blogs.  Bell has been asking about our wedding, so I got down the box with the dress and hat.  Bell was properly impressed with a fancy dress, but she was more impressed with the craft box that had been on top of the wedding box.  She spent the next hour making something out of scraps of ribbon.

 While looking at the dress, I also found all the letters that Jack and I had sent each other during that courting summer.  As I flipped through them, I was soon soon sucked into reading whole passages, remembering the magic of that time.  I had forgotten how good of a writer Jack is.  I had also forgotten what we were before we were us.

I am a ponderer, but I prefer not to ponder about what other lives I might have lived instead of this one.  We used to be young enough to wear those pretty wedding clothes, but I much prefer the us who stayed home today to putter around.   That man I married is still perfect enough to give me days like this and to know when I need them.