Advent 20: Mopping Up Friday Round-Up

I mopped the kitchen floor today. I don’t do it that often so it is a BFD. I’d include a picture but I’d have to go downstairs to take one. Suffice to say, my kitchen sparkles like a new engagement ring. This, because my husband’s best friend is here on his annual visit. My mothers-in-law used to spur this kind of action but they are gone and took their fearsomeness with them.

Swirl barked today. It was an enormous, thunderous, house-filling bark of a dog that had waited months to express himself. NO! he barked to his new sidekick Punchy, YOU MAY NOT LOOK AT MY BONE. I took the bone just to show him I could but I also remembered Mary Shields telling us how she rotated her sled dogs from doghouse to doghouse so they didn’t get territorial. So I put the bone away but I know that if I took it out and handed it to Punchy, he would back away from it, the bone already having been claimed in the most vocal way by Swirl. There’s a limit to how much I can meddle in their relationship.

The warming room that we fought about is finally open. It is a room in a senior center that is essentially barricaded from the rest of the building as if everyone coming through the door has typhoid, the seniors still being convinced that homeless people are dangerous and threatening despite their being there only when the old people aren’t. There is nothing in the warming room but cots, pillows, and blankets and there is nothing to do but sleep. This bothers me no end but I can’t fix it.

My son and I helped set up the warming room last night. After we were done and back in the car, he told me that he knew two of the homeless guys that had come in to sleep on the cots we’d set up. So that was our dose of ‘there but fortune’ for the day. Two. He knew two.

Christmas is in a couple of days. And I am as unprepared and disorganized as ever though it bothers me less every year since I came to realize that Christmas is a time of year, not an event. It is an occasion, not a performance. There is no score. Christmas comes and it goes. And everybody motors along as if nothing happened. Which is as it should be.