leading with the beautiful

May is my favorite month, after November.  The weather's still a little cool and rainy this year, with occasional glimpses of gorgeous sun.    The kids and I went on a walking tour of our city with friends last week, leaving the house under lowering clouds, and arriving at Independence Hall forty minutes later to find glorious sunshine.  Our flowers are all at their peak. (Note to self: plant some variety so we have blooms all summer.) Our milkweed is back and more abundant than ever.  We talk about the pool opening and summer plans.  Boy, do we ever have summer plans.  

Every May, I try to make a jaunt to a favorite hike of ours (shown here) to go birding; it's about an hour and a half away from us now.   Probably foolish to just jump in the car and drive there on a whim, no?  But one afternoon, that's exactly what we did.  We loaded the ten passenger van, the littles, Z and I, and we drove.  Out past the last efforts of the suburbs and strip malls, through fields and forests, by farms and more farms.  We never did take that hike; the trails were closed.  I didn't cry, I promise, no matter how much I wanted to.  I took one photo of the dam, and then we trekked back home.  Just the simple act of driving, with silent children in the back of the car listening to an audiobook, was medicinal.  (No comment on how much gas we used and the price to refill the tank.)

Before:

After:

Our old house improvements continue, though, despite a halt on our little house renovations (and here).  The landing between our first and second floors has been a thorn in my flesh since we moved in.  The previous owner had mounted a mini-split unit above the window on the left, and knocked out a pane of glass to do so.  When we installed central air a few years ago, that came down, but the drip line pane remained boarded up.  My boys broke out two more window panes--winning window tic-tac-toe!--the most recent of which got a plastic bag taped over it.  We're nothing if not classy.  The window on the right looked into my husband's closet in the second floor laundry room addition.  We're still scratching our heads over that one.  It would have made more sense to close in a smaller portion of the second floor and leave that window free, but who knows? Old house quirks.  Anyway, both windows had to go. Our friend closed off the closet and refurbished a new window out of the two old ones.  That's supposedly temporary, while we look for the perfect replacement, but it may become permanent. I really like it. I may do something to make the glass opaque, though.  There's not much of a view.

Yesterday I sat down after lunch for a little knitting break when I noticed a hornet on the window by my chair.  I released it outside, and just as I was walking in some weeds caught my eye.  So I pulled them.  When I washed the dirt off my hands, the towels in the bathroom needed replacing.  In the laundry room, where I found said towels...well, several hours later I had completed a plethora of necessary little chores, but alas! I'd not knit a single stitch.  There's a restless kind of energy this time of year. 

Sewing curtains out of some lovely block print cotton to hide the innards of the closets in our laundry room helped.  Something about the rhythm of pressing, pinning, and walking between the ironing board and my sewing machine satisfies all my restlessness.  The curtains are (again) a temporary fix until we can finish out the closets with drywall and floors and find closet doors--low on the list of priorities.  My new motto is "If you can't fix it completely, make it look nicer."  I bet there's a life lesson in that.