the days, they are a changin'

can't believe that it's the end of another day. mom's been prepping the room for paint, and tomorrow, she'll've applied two coats of primer (kilZ) and so thursday, we shall begin to paint. that room will be jert's choice, a medium blue with a touch of green. aqua-something (i can't recall the actual name, and i'm too damn lazy to walk out in the other room and check).

so while she prep'd away, i worked a lil on the kitchen and continued to sort thru things and all. when jert came home, we loaded the boxes i've packed over the past few days into the truck and he put them with the yard-sale items. we're gonna try the yard-sale again in mid-may (since we got rained out on saturday). he joined me in clearing a few piles of things and i came across his first wife's journal.

the very first entry is about the first phone call with jerry over thirty years ago. she writes about being nervous on their first date and holding hands and their wedding and how very much she loves him and gets lonely without him (he was in the coast guard and so was out on the ship often). she wrote relatively rarely, so the diary was rather short, altho it spanned several years. she wrote of her first child, a lil girl who looked like her daddy with brown hair and brown button eyes. she wrote of her first lil boy and his wonderful smile.

it was so very sweet and made her all that much more real for me. my favorite part was that the last entry she wrote; along the lines that it was three years since she'd married jerry and that she loved him more 'now' than she had when they first married. to me, that's wonderful. that's what good relationships do, they grow stronger with the passage of time. finding her diary was balm to my soul. it made me love him all the more, tenderly.

this evening, jert's son-in-law came over and helped move quite a few things that are large and heavy and awkward. as the men heaved and ho'ed, my mom and i scurried about with the dust pan and whisk broom. and then, i discovered a dead bloated mouse that most likely was the source of the stench i'd been smelling all day yesterday and today. shudder.

when i let shaddow in, she ran around, smelling and checking out everything. i'd moved the feeding/water bowls and so she nosed around the kitchen til she located them, slurped once to reassure herself that ok, that's where they are and then zoomed off to check out the other changes. harley and pearl have been in and out all day, so they sorta supervised everything and kept up with all the changes as they occured. i didn't let shaddow in the house earlier, cuz i'd had the front door open and was airing out a few things. shaddow was in the side yard, which is fenced and is a lot safer for her since she isn't used to being around a highway and is used to running around a five hundred acre farm. perhaps eventually i can trust her not to get distracted and do something dumb, like dodge into traffic cuz euw it all just smells too interesting not to check out. ya know how dogs are...love the smell of decaying pee'd-on tires and exhaust of cars zooming down the highway.

well, tomorrow brings yet another phase. hopefully, mom will be finishing up the primer in the side bedroom toward the front of the house. and i'll be sorting thru some other cupboards in the kitchen as well as doing some preliminary cleaning of the floor and part of the walls in the kitchen where a very large cabinet unit sat. whew.