Mini-Retirement

(From a few years back, which explains why Atticus isn't really out buying donuts at 11 p.m., and why it isn't really Poetry Friday today. But the explanation of mini-retirement is still accurate. I love you, Atticus!)

Summer with Atticus goes something like this:

1. We experience a period of what my friend Sally calls "mini retirement." Sally's married to a teacher. She knows what it's like to suddenly have her husband around the house more often than usual. And how it feels to be extremely grateful for the privilege while simultaneously struggling to reorder a routine. She knows what it's like to tell herself to just shut up about where he tends to leave the salt shaker.

2. Adjustment period ends quickly. Everyone is happy.  Who cares where the salt shaker is?

3. Atticus takes over meal planning and cooking for a couple of months.

4. If I were the kind of person who jumps up and down and claps, I would do so at this point. You know how I feel about cooking. I'm figuratively jumping up and down right now.

5. Atticus is, at this very moment, out buying donuts from the new donut shop in town for the girls.  They've been wanting to try it. I keep saying, "Oh, yeah.  We need to do that. We'll get there soon ...." whereas Atticus actually goes out and buys the donuts.

6. He selects this moving piece from Robert Frost for Poetry Friday:

Two Look at Two
by Robert Frost

Love and forgetting might have carried them
A little further up the mountain side
With night so near, but not much further up.
They must have halted soon in any case
With thoughts of a path back, how rough it was
With rock and washout, and unsafe in darkness;
When they were halted by a tumbled wall
With barbed-wire binding. They stood facing this,
Spending what onward impulse they still had
In One last look the way they must not go,
On up the failing path, where, if a stone
Or earthslide moved at night, it moved itself;
No footstep moved it. 'This is all,' they sighed,
Good-night to woods.' But not so; there was more.
A doe from round a spruce stood looking at them
Across the wall, as near the wall as they.
She saw them in their field, they her in hers.
The difficulty of seeing what stood still,
Like some up-ended boulder split in two,
Was in her clouded eyes; they saw no fear there.
She seemed to think that two thus they were safe.

(Read the whole poem here.)

I do love Robert Frost (as evidenced by the number of times he's been invited over for Poetry Friday.) 

I do love summer.

And I do truly, madly, deeply love that man I call Atticus.