Before and after

Is it just me or are clouds of fruit flies swarming your kitchen, dancing around on your apples and bananas?  I have become an efficient fruit fly murderer.  I pour a little red wine vinegar into a glass ramekin and add a drop of liquid dish detergent and swish it around.  Then the fruit flies dive in and drown.

You’re welcome.  And you thought I wasn’t a superstar housewife!  Hey, don’t judge me by the dog-hair tumbleweeds.

In other news, I put on a light sweater, socks and shoes and jeans tonight because it seemed like fall weather outside.  And then I realized it was 69 degrees.  Sixty-nine degrees in Seattle means it’s warm enough to go to the waterpark.  It’s all perspective.

What else?  Well, mid-terms are next week.  That means we are nearly a quarter of the way through the school year.  This seems impossible, though I have made enough school lunches to last me until I settle into my room in the nursing home.  (I know, I know.  I could make my boy make his own lunch but I don’t want to.  I just want to complain about making them.)

September 21 marked the twenty-fourth anniversary of my dad’s death.  I was twenty-four when he died, so my life can now be divided neatly in half.  Twenty-four years with a dad; twenty-four years without.  I like symmetry but I do not like this.  He missed out on so much–and my kids missed out on having their grandfather.  It’s not fair, but as he always said, “Life isn’t fair.”

What’s odd is that men my own age remind me of my dad.  Weird, right?  But my dad was forty-seven when he died, so men about that age–about my age–look the same age he did when he died.  Forty-seven seemed like a reasonable life-span to me when I was twenty-four.  I mean, it still seemed too young, crazy and impossible and all that, but he seemed like he’d lived a lot of life.  And he had.

But now?  Now as a forty-eight year old woman, I see that forty-seven is just getting started.

At least I hope so.  I still have a lot of fruit flies to kill and school lunches to make and soccer games to cheer and books to read and sunsets to watch and stuff to do before I’m plucked from this earth.