Asakiyume mita

While cleaning out the shed this past weekend, I found a number of things that are no longer useful to our household. A lawn spreader, for instance. I used it once, to spread lime. Then I decided to leave the lawn to its own devices, and now I have thyme and clover and hawkweed and dandelion and plantain growing--along with various sorts of grasses--and contentedly watch the bees and butterflies all summer long.

Also two skateboards, a snowboard, a soccer ball, and a street hockey stick and puck. "We never used it for street hockey," the ninja girl reminisced, later. "It was always a weapon or a staff or something like that in the games we played."

I put these out on my front lawn with a sign saying "Mysterious items found in shed; help yourself" and went into the house to post them in the neighborhood facebook group. By the time I had done that and come back outside, the lawn spreader was already gone. Brilliant!

Some time later, in the evening, I came onto my porch to shuck some corn, heard voices out front, and lo and behold, there were four children out front, three girls--sisters--and a boy. The older two girls, maybe 11 and 9 years old, were each cradling a skateboard. The boy had the street hockey stick and puck. The youngest girl, maybe 6 or 7, was standing dejectedly in front of the snowboard and soccer ball.

"Oh hi!" said the oldest sister, when she saw me. "We can really take this stuff?"

"Yes, definitely," I said. "I appreciate it!"

"She's unhappy," said the middle sister, indicating the youngest one. "Because she wanted the street hockey stick, but Noah took it."

"I love street hockey!" said Noah fervently.

"Do you have another one in your shed?" asked the middle sister.

"I'm afraid not--that's all the stuff I have," I said. "I don't suppose she'd like a soccer ball? I guess probably everyone has a soccer ball, huh."

"Well. Not everyone," said the oldest sister.

"What if you share it?" said Middle to Youngest. And then, to Noah, "Next time you come, you could trade off with her." From which I gleaned that Noah is visiting.

Somehow they sorted things out to Noah and Youngest's satisfaction.

"Please take the soccer ball too!" I begged. "All this stuff was my kids'.** I'm not going to be playing soccer."

"What grade are your kids in?" asked Middle.

"Oh, they're all grown up." I said. Oldest and Middle nodded. Of course, of course. That explained everything!

Youngest generously deigned to take the soccer ball, which left only the snowboard. You can't really expect to move a snowboard in August! Today I took it to the take-and-leave hut at the town transfer station.


**Actually, one of the skateboards was mine, but I don't plan on skateboarding in the future.

skateboarder
We went to a housewarming the other day--a lovely housewarming, lovely house, lovely guests. One of the guests was a skinny seven-year-old girl who was experimenting with a skateboard on the slightly inclined driveway. She may have had glasses; I can't recall. She had skinny short blond-brown hair to match her frame, and a big grin, and missing teeth because that's the age when you lose your teeth.

"I had brain surgery," she confided in me. "In PT I have to do balancing, forward and backward and side to side. This is like that."
She was really good! When the skateboard picked up speed, she'd crouch down.

"She's not supposed to do anything like this," said her mom, "but I want her to be able to try things out."



earrings
The youngest daughter of the house, who is only three, had stubbed her toe and was concerned with the blub, as she called it. "Blub!" she said, very seriously, pointing at the trace of blood left on her toe. She liked my dangly earrings, so I made her some of her own out of some hosta flowers. I bent them around her earlobe, like a hearing aid, with the flowers dangling forward. They looked pretty fetching, if I do say so myself.

misty moisty
Also the other day, it was a misty moisty morning.



One misty, moisty, morning,
When cloudy was the weather,
There I met an old man
All clothed in leather

I didn't meet such a man. But the joe pyeweed is quite tall now.



And in the mist, wild cucumber flowers shine like candles

The peepers were peeping in the lake behind the baseball field and in the low-lying area next to the Dunkin Donuts, where a duck was sleeping in spite of the singing.

By the rec department, the skate park was getting some use:







At the dump, a sign said, "New stickers are pass due!" They meant past due; they meant, you need a new sticker, for 2015, if you're going to be dumping trash here, but they'd written "pass due," because in American English, that's what it sounds like, and if you think about it, the sticker is a pass, a pass for using the facilities, though the pass isn't due, it's past due, which takes us back to the initial problem.