Returning home from Pennsylvania is always bittersweet. Sweet, because it's good to see the Husband and the Hound and sleep in our own beds again. Bitter, because I hate leaving my family and returning to loads of dirty laundry, not to mention the dishes waiting in the sink. (Or resuming our usual schedule, i.e. naps at regular intervals. Baby Bear, I wish you could read this.) I had just enough fortitude to haul everything inside from the car, (Driving up, it's called "being prepared." Coming home it's called "over-packing".) but that's as far as I got. Monday morning is wash day, and in honor of the beginning of the new week, I managed to drag the suitcase and tote bags to the bottom of the stairs. That was as close to my goal as I could manage.
Truthfully, the only thing I wanted to do was read The Help by Kathryn Stockett. Have you read it? Have you, huh, huh? You should. Just drop everything, grab a mug of coffee, and read, read, read. And don't give me any excuses about children, careers, carpooling, yada, yada. I was adamantly ignoring mine, so you can ignore yours too.
The Help is the kind of book that puts you smack in the middle of a story that you can smell, taste, and feel. The words flow off the page to wrap around you so that you feel like you're living the story right beside the characters. I loved every sweet, sad, and bite-your-nails-with-worry minute of it. So you can guess how enthusiastic I was about tackling the household chores. Yup, that much. Luckily, the air conditioner heard my grumbling and decided to go on sabbatical. We're calling it a sabbatical, because hopefully the AC men will arrive tomorrow to give it a tune up, and it will wake up refreshed and renewed.
The air is working downstairs, but upstairs it feels like a sauna. It's only early May, and today is overcast, so it's not unbearable. But I feel bad for the Husband who's office is populated by computers that give off a lot of heat. We called a temporary ban on all appliance use upstairs to keep the Husband's head from catching on fire, and that meant that I couldn't use the washer. So sad. And since he used my kitchen sponge for the clean-up of a painting project over the weekend, doing the dishes was out of the question as well. (How could I possibly go to the grocery store with an enthralling book to read?) With my chores out of the way temporarily, the only thing to do was read. And before you think I set the Baby Bear free in the park while I read, my definition of reading these days is five minutes here, ten minutes there, with breaks for extricating the Bear from whatever piece of furniture she has decided to climb.
And now, creative dearies, I have to return to The Help and finish the last two chapters. This book is so good that after I'm done, I'll have a mini-book-depression for a day or so where I lament that it had to end. Sigh. I hate it when they end.
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