A Recent Memory Made

This week, October 6-10, 2008 my wife Terry has been on vacation. She has had a pleasant week at home pretty much tackling chores she wants tackled. One of the chores has been the processing of apples. she has made four batches of apple butter which we packed into pint glass jars and processed through a water bath on Saturday. She was at chores all day Saturday ending in the evening with her cutting my hair. Finally we settled down for the evening. I took a quick shower to get rid of the aftermath of the haircut and she took a quick shower to freshen up and feel decent.

I roasted 18 of our fresh chestnuts from our trees. Wisconsin was playing Penn State on TV and she does not make a fuss when I watch college football as she knows I dearly love that sport. As I was sitting in my usual chair at my computer watching the game she came into the room after her shower in her pj's and sat in her favorite easy chair. Our dog Cilia was dutifully picked up and place in her usual position next to Terry. So here we sat, a small family in Arkansas with me enjoying my Big 10 game.

I glanced over at Terry and she had the recliner fully extended. In one hand was a magazine with recipes, next to her was Cilia and she was munching on one of our favorite seasonal snacks, fresh roasted chestnuts. I never said anything, I just watched her sitting there studying the recipes, slowly munching chestnuts. She was truly at peace and looked so comfortable. It was one of those scenes that makes sense of why we work so hard to provide for ourselves and our loved ones. The only other thing that would've been more traditional would've been to have a fire in the fireplace. However it was still about 80 degrees and we don't have a fireplace. The memory is burned into my long-term memory and it made for a fitting end to a pleasant week of vacation.