We cleaned and tidied the house thoroughly this weekend, in preparation for visitors* who are not now going to visit.
We live opposite a train station, and there is always a lot of litter in our front yard. While doing my Monday night chore of putting out the rubbish and recyclables, I paused, just before tying up the black binbag, and decided to go and get my gardening gloves, and put all the litter into the binbag, so that the outside of the house looked as lovely as the inside, because at that point I didn’t know that the visitors wouldn’t be visiting.
At that moment, the telephone rang, so I left the front door wide open, the black binbag in the yard, and went to answer it. It was my mum, telling me someone had died, but it wasn’t anyone close so you needn’t send a card. While offering standard sympathy to mum, Pete came home. He strode manfully through the house to the kitchen, where we keep the gardening gloves, and went back outside to collect the litter in the front yard.
It was rather like I had left the idea of picking up the litter hovering in the front yard, and he absorbed it as he walked through.
*The visitors have little or no relevance to this post.
October 6, 2005
Pete can read my mind
This is, of course, adorable. I like the idea of a Karen-bubble of purpose that is absorbed by a Pete.
I think this is terrible. You threw away litter that was hovering in the front yard (don’t you mean "front garden" or have you moved to America?) when it should have been preserved for scientific study. Surely litter that hovers could offer interesting anti-gravity properties for scientific study.
Oh. Wait. The idea was hovering. Right. Sorry.
No, it’s definitely a front yard. Garden implies things like, oooh, I don’t know, grass and stuff.
I should think that most of the litter is donated by the lovely school kids that congregate outside the station every morning, and seem unaware of what bins are for…
Thanks Lyle – as someone who walks past our house every day, you can certainly confirm that it is a yard not a garden. We do have a garden at the back, Graybo – full of sweet peas that were planted too early.
My sweet peas went in too early too and generally were pretty poor this year. However, I have some good autumn colour going on, with Rhus typhina and Parthenocissus quinquefolia leading the fireworks display.