Beltane                 Waxing Flower Moon

Most of my life happens at a right turn off a moderately busy secondary road somewhere in the heartland of the North American continent.  This thought crossed my mind as I retrieved the orange fluorescent sign for our garage sale, the one posted at the corner of 153rd Ave. NW and Round Lake Boulevard.

When I turned back into our lot, then went back in the house, I realized how rich and thick the world is inside our house and how thin it is on the road leading up to it.  That’s not to say there’s nothing of interest along the way, of course there is.  Other people’s rich thick worlds for one thing.  The life of the oak, acacia and poplar woods  that surrounds our homes for another.

My comment is not so much about the thin world leading up to our door as the contrast between my experience of our home and of that space.  In here we have taken pains to have rooms devoted to particular needs.  In those rooms our life has taken place, at least our domestic life, for just at 15 years.  Memories.

We create here, too.  Kate quilts; I write.  We create a life together, a buttress of support for our family and our selves.  The garden and the flower beds, now multiple, have years of labor represented in their current configuration, labor that has made this place an intimate acquaintance.

This is  home.  Home is where the heart is, yes, but it also where life is.

Beltane             Waxing Flower Moon

The garage sale continues.  Kate’s out there right now, doing the crossword puzzle and waiting for customers.  They’ve been slow to come.  Kate thinks she’s got items that are too high end, though she advertised for collectibles.  That may be but my guess is the economy and the pandemic have squeezed shopping for other than essentials right outta folks.

We’ll see as the day progresses and she drops her prices.  There is some anthropological phenomenon going on with garage sales, the retailing of stuff and the occasional turn of domestic space into a faux business, like lemonade stands for adults.  Not only do we get to sell our stuff, but we get to display what we don’t need.  Look at this stuff I don’t need.  If I don’t need this, what more and better stuff lies inside!  Perhaps its a bargain-basement potlatch.

The pandemic seems further away right away now since Kate has four days off and we don’t have the daily updates from Minnesota Public Health.  Monday though she goes in to fit her N95, a special mask for doctors and nurses.  It needs to have an air tight seal around the nose and mouth.

Today is another day in the garden for me.