I should have got a photo. I caught Gary vacuuming his woodpile.

He likes his woodpile just so, and though he used get all incensed when I called the woodpile”his” and insisted it was “ours,” he also refused to letter anyone else work on it. I don’t touch it. Our sons are not allowed to touch it.

He is preparing for a cord to redelivered in May or June. It will not be burned before 2024. He has two vacuums, one is reserved for inside the house. He uses the other one to clean the car, garage, attic, and, apparently, the woodpile. No rodents, no rodent nests, no appreciable collections of insects, seeds, or other debris. The wood is beautiful and he had just finished splitting cedar for kindling. We have a woodpile because we still heat with wood in a woodstove. Our wood is aged neatly stacked for a year so that it dries. Our fires are hot, brief, and help keep our home comfortable in a damp location. And, here, when we have a fire it is almost always raining. It does seem that this winter it has always been raining.

I also failed get photograph of the landscaping crew that come by every three or four weeks to mow and trim, whether there is anything to mow or now. They mowed the grass in the snow—not that there was any growth to mow, there usually isn’t for several months in the winter. But there they were with mower, leaf blower and trimmer, in and away in less than an hour. That was pretty funny. Took four of them to plant something this week. It wasn’t anything big, and they mostly stood around the hole, talking.

A lot of talk from one person about hiring “professionals” at our condo. I don’t know how much we paid professionals top the line of cypress at uneven heights, never mind my question about why they needed be topped at all. I was told they bent right over under the ice. Uh-huh, and then they stood right back up again. (Palm trees will blow over till they lie flat on the ground during a hurricane, and then pop right back up once the winds die down.) Professionals charged $450 to put less than a cubic yard of fresh soil and ten plants in the two planters outside the entrance. Nothing fancy, four bedding plants and a central spiky something (Cordyline?) in the middle of each. Sadly, professionals insist that laurels can only, only be planted in November, and then that job was put off. Professionals have not been available to repaint the steel side door, but never mind it’s been too cold to paint. Last spring we had our building windows washed just before having the mortar power washed and repaired on the exterior of the building which dirtied the windows worse than ever. That was no big deal, but I am not leaning out a fifth story window to clean the outsides of our five windows. Though if I could get a photo of that it might be pretty funny.

I have neglected my teeth. Part of this is the missed appointments during the pandemic. The rest is fear. I have bad teeth, several crowns and just now I have a brand new temporary crown. The molars on one side had been giving me trouble for years. The tooth in front of it needed a root canal (great fun in April 2020), which failed to end the pain, and I avoided chewing on that side in the years since until it HURT! and I realized that my new dentist was right, it was the molar behind the root canal giving me trouble. Cracked/split in two directions. Ouch. This morning I chewed on that side of my mouth deliberately for the first time in over three years. Amazing.

One son found the link to my podcast in his thousands (literally) of emails, listened to it, and called to apologize for not listening to it soon and to ask questions. The other son called to make clear that he was deeply attached to the beach house, but that he regarded it first and foremost as his parents’ home. Those were great calls.

In the mean time, so far this NaNo month I have revised nearly 67k words of the novel, All the Daughters Sing. I still have two characters’ stories to tell (the hard part) and the closing sequences to revise and add from the original document to the newly revised copy. Then I think I will need to start at the beginning and revise again at least a couple of times. I think I might finish with close to 80k after all.

I submitted two flash fictions to a contest this morning, and received a rejection of another story to another contest. Winning contests is really not on the program, but when I like the publication, I figure my entry fee is going to a good cause. All good.

There should be another photo right here, but we already established that I have failed to get those shots. Picture Gary vacuuming neatly stacked cordwood, three men providing unnecessary lawn care in the snow, me leaning out fifty feet above the sidewalk and wiping windows (only in our imagination), and me in the dentist’s chair with my mouth wide open for over two hours—no wait, that last doesn’t require much imagination. Does it?