Back to Grandma's yard

Once we moved into our house, I unconsciously began reassembling my favorite elements of my grandma's house. It was built around the same time as ours, about seventy miles away.

I planted the lilacs I remembered, and purple iris, four o'clocks with their small round seeds like little cartoon bombs, peonies and black-eyed susans and mint. I've had tomatoes some years, and chives, and geraniums that were her favorite shade of coral pink.

Now that we have storm windows with screens, we can open the windows on days when it's not too hot and get a very satisfying and soothing breeze.

I even found Sweetheart Soap, the smell of which takes me back to being four years old again.

And now I have a clothesline (I suppose we have a clothesline, but it's mostly mine), an umbrella style clothesline that you take down when you're not using it. When I was little, we could hang a sheet from each of the four sides and I would have the best garden house (girl equivalent of a fort) you could ask for. I tried it out today for the first time, and yes, everything dried just fine and blew picturesquely in the breeze especially for my benefit.

Wordle Essay: How I spent my summer in Twitter

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I'm tired... so tired *

I'm a little loath to admit this, especially with the likes of Eolai out there, but I detest filling bicycle tires.

I like to ride my bicycle, but every spring I delay later the day when I must fill the bicycle tires.

It doesn't help that our garage is beginning to look like the home for stray two-wheelers. I keep trying to fulfill my Jessica Fletcher fantasy and get a marvelous heavy old sheep dog of a bike (ladies' style, of course) to ride around town. To the train station, or to the farmers' market (same thing in our town). This means I have three sets of hungry tires to feed once the snow melts. One has gone lame (=needs new tires), but the other two are just fine.

We do have two very functional bicycle pumps. But one of them attaches in a funny way, and I always waste ages pumping away while a gentle hissing sound reminds me that none of this effort is actually putting air into the tires. My hands get bruised, my back gets sore, and I get maybe six pounds of pressure registering. (I do have a very nice tire gauge.)

So my preferred solution is to walk the bike to the nearest filling station (Does anyone still call them that? You know, a gas station.) and use the compressed air hose. I'm offended by the ones that expect me to put quarters in a machine to get air, so I seek out places that give away air for free. There's one about half a mile from the house. I trundle my lovely heavy bicycle over there, and that's when I'm forced to admit that I am also no good with a compressed air hose. I press down and, like a baby refusing to nurse, the tire just gets flatter and flatter as I fish for the nozzle sunk deep in the rim. Then I get into a rhythm: aha! it's latched on! here comes the air! whoops, no, now it's just releasing it all again, yes! got it now! no, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, wow that's fast, it'll be really firm, last all summer long... BANG!! Ears ringing, I look around , hoping no one's been watching me. I trudge home with my crippled paleolithic bike and wonder if I could just get solid tires like I had when I was a little kid.

* lyric reference from Blazing Saddles