Front Porch Reveries

After breakfast today I went out to my front porch with a cup of coffee.  This is my peaceful thing to do.  

While the kids attempt to do dishes.  Which often involves a certain amount of bickering. To which I prefer to avoid listening when possible. 

I sneak outside to my quiet spot.

This morning, I deadheaded some petunias.  I peered over my railing at the several brightly blooming wonders below.  I sipped my coffee and listened to the birds sing. 

I watched Joe pace around the property, wondering what he was up to.

(Ought the previous sentence to read, "...wondering to what he was up"?  or "...wondering up to what he was"?  Sometimes grammatical correctness is elusive.) 

When Joe got near enough to the front porch, I saw he had his flannel shirt full of something.  As in, he was holding up the shirt tails around a load of something.  Ahhh, then I understood. 

We often have a large crop of mushrooms when conditions are right, which they are right now.  We've researched these mushrooms. We think they are the common meadow mushroom, which is very similar to the plain white mushrooms one can easily get in the supermarket.  Tasty and benign.  But each year, when the crop comes in, we are a little bit too scared to try them.  I think Joe is getting ready to sample them this year.   We shall see.

After enjoying the sights and sounds of the outdoors for awhile, I went inside to get my computer with the idea that I'd find a way to write something interesting for my blog readers.  But first, of course, I had to check my facebook.  Not much happening there.  No new e-mail clambering for attention, either.  I guess nobody loves me. (That is tongue in cheek by the way.  But I must admit that it is in my sinful human nature to feel that way betimes.  I often joke about it thusly, in order to remind my self how foolish a notion it really is.)

Time to write.  But alas!  Ugh, it suddenly, in the few minutes I was doing my social networking checks, suddenly the air changed from the pleasant morning air after a rain, to the heavy stickiness of a Minnesota summer.  We don't very often have that kind of stickiness here, for which I am very thankful.  The summer weather here is much nicer than that in southern Minnesota, as far as the humidity goes.  But there are always a handful of days when the conditions are just right that the air seems to really weigh on a person.  It's not even that hot today.  The thermometer shows only 68 degrees.  But the sunlight is filtering through the haze and the air is such that I was sweating, just sitting there.

So I came inside.  I suppose I should change my post title to Front Room Reveries, but that's not nearly so romantic sounding.  I suppose some people may have a nice clean and pleasant front room from which to revere, but that is not the case in my home. 

Sadly. 

My front room is cluttered with the detritus of a large family and burned-out mom.  Towels, books, papers, coloring books, newspaper, clean and dirty laundry, toys, stuffed animals, wrappers, flip-flops, kleenex, and yes, even two empty egg cartons (?).

This is not the stuff of romance and imagination. 

No!  this is reality. 

But reality also has little arms that wrap around my neck, and medium bodies that snuggle up next to me, and big almost grown-up hearts that occasional overflow to Mama with all their hopes and dreams and traumas.  Romance aside, clean or cluttered, reality does have a certain draw that imagination has only in, well, imagination.