Findings.

Today, we came home from the farmer's market with our bounty: Asian pears from the Asian pear guy; peppers, purple potatoes, brioche, broccoli, basil; a big bag of arugula; and more grapes.

"What are you going to do with your day?" the historian wanted to know.

"I need to do a little bit of grading, and maybe a little bit of writing, and some cleaning and straightening," I said with grand optimism.

The cleaning and straightening was an idea that came to me--sort of a fall cleaning thing, because summer with its windows open and in-and-out all day and night is coming to a close. This week has been so full of things--two grandsons' birthdays, the onset of full meeting mode at work, troubles with the LMS for teaching, evening outings...I felt I had lost a little part of my brain and, on Thursday night, forgot something kind of enormous. I had been looking forward to the weekend so that I could collect a little bit of my collectedness. A meager portion of that to begin with, frankly--I can't stand to lose much of it.

Pretty quickly, I got busy putting away summer clothes and shoes, setting aside a few things to give away, getting out fall clothes and shoes and sweeping a good amount of summer dust. I put away a bunch of things and that felt great. While I was going through the vast troves of apparel and footwear, I found my red suede ankle boots, which seemed both fortunate and propitious--both lucky and also a different kind of lucky--and I wore them tonight when we went out to see The Master.

I also started to organize stuff on the hard drive of my iMac. Things were a little out of control there, especially the amount of music and photo files. I spent part of the afternoon in the thicket of Mac forums, trying to find out where in the hell Mountain Lion puts my actual photo files. Apple! Why are you so bossy! I ran across the letter my youngest son had written to his grandfather--my dad--explaining his college plans. It was so elegant and mature sounding, and not really meant for me to read, which made it an extra pleasure.

This afternoon, after I had set aside my labors, I got an e-mail from my dad:

Found the attached pic while rummaging through some thumb drives.  A little photo shopping and it turned out quite nicely.  Your Grandmother, Mother and three aunts are in this photo.  I hope you will treasure it.

My mom looks so young there, smiling and leaning forward. I think I have a picture of myself at that same age, when I was the young mother of a girl with a brand new trike.

I would get organized, but what about the rummaging? and how perfect it is to find the stuff you forgot you have?