Hot Days

It is hot and sticky in Boston.  For the last four weeks, I have been under Doctor's Orders to avoid swimming.  Boo.

For most of this hot and sweaty past month, we have been making due with our buckets. These "tub trugs" are one of my favorite non-toy toys of all time.  Elsie and I use them for everything: laundry, gardening, organizing, play-time, and, of course, bathing.

The smell of hose-water is one of those visceral memory cues.  Smells have this way of dredging up a vivid and lucid sense of the long-ago.  Hose water conjures a childhood of 1980s summers splashing around in a dinky plastic wading pool, or running through a sprinkler, muddying up the lawn.  Elsie is now primed for hose-water memories of her own.  We spend hours in these buckets: I, soaking my feet, and Elsie, in like a tub.

It's no deep blue sea, but it works.

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Friday marked my 4 weeks.  Elsie and I celebrated by heading to a local town beach and filling our swim suits with duck weed.  Next week, the ocean!