Summer is Giving Way to Fall... and Other Ramblings

The green of the leaves and grasses is old and faded. I tend to mourn the passing away of summer even while relishing the arrival of cooler weather.  Swimming and sweating are done. There’s school instead.  It is time for canning and cleaning away the crop of cobwebs in all the ceiling corners.
Speaking of spiders and cobwebs.  It is better to vacuum them up.  Imagine sweeping down spiders and webs with a broom. The spiders go where?  I feel crawly just thinking about that.  When you merely disturb  their career for a day or two by catching the web on a broom, they’re bound to be back to rebuild.  It’s much less creepy to extend the sweeper hose and watch those spiders and their creations disappear into the end of the nozzle forever. 
I babysat Benny while his parents went fishing on Labor Day.  Benny likes me a lot, so them leaving him with me was easy.  He thought I should sit and play with him and I did some.  When I went back to my work; He followed me around hopefully but only until he saw I was useless and then he began his own explorations.  At a year old, he walks and climbs and investigates.  So you can’t really have him out of sight.  It has not been that long since I had a baby of my own, yet I realized with the grandbabies home this summer that we have forgotten how much care and time babies take.  Being Marmee is the best!  You get to have all the fun of babies and sleep at night, too.   :)
Then there are the methodical thieves in our neighborhood.  They have successfully broken into and cleaned out the local church building more than once…of computers and school equipment.  Our house is two or three blocks away, so we’re locking everything up again, too.  We are frustrated.  We have lived in this little village for most of 25 years and have never needed to lock anything.  We’ve gone for trips for over a week and left the house open before.  Those innocent days seem to be over for us.
Our house is for-sale-by-owner, as it has been for several years already.  The reasons are obvious.  Unfortunately those same reasons are why it will take a miracle to sell it.   If we didn’t like our house, we’d really be in a jam.  Or if we HAD to sell it, which we don’t. 
 
Here’s one of my latest wonderings. Our providers spend hours, days, weeks, months, and years working to bring home the bacon.  Have you ever thought of how mundane and endless that must feel for them?  Even though Elv enjoys his job; the fact is that it gets really boring sometimes.  And getting out there every single work day takes what my mom calls “stick-to-it-iveness”.   I think we women ought to consider our rich and varied days of home creating, baby care, teaming up with our teens, and chumming with our friends over the phone or tea times as wonderful privileges. I would hate to have to trade roles with my man…I think I’d fail it.
 
Get rid of the fruit flies by luring them to their deaths.  Pour a little apple cider vinegar into a quart jar. Roll up a piece of typing paper to the shape of a funnel.  Put the small end into the jar with most of the paper standing out of the top of the jar.  Very soon the vinegar in the jar will be full of floating fruit fly bodies! Eww!  But that is SO much better than all over the kitchen.  Or you can keep house like my mom and never have them in the first place, but I don’t know how to do that.