Today was a day of things that made me laugh.

One of the first was coming into the kitchen after my daughters did the dishes, and discovering our rye sourdough starter container had been properly labeled.

I love my kids’ sense of humour!

The dump was open today, so I wanted to make sure to go.  Just as I was about to sort the recycling, having paused to take a few quick photos of Hungry Girl and Barbecue outside our living room window, the phone rang.  It was my mother.  After our greetings, she asked what I was doing, so I told her that I was about to get the recycling together to go to the dump.

Oh?  Do I go to the dump often?

I explained that I try to go once a week, but we don’t have that much garbage, so it’s usually about once every two or three weeks.  So she starts asking me what it is I’m putting in the garbage?

Huh?

Garbage. ???  What else would it be?

It seemed such a strange and silly thing to ask, and yet she was perfectly serious.

She rephrased her question.

Garbage, I told her again.  And recycling.  I wasn’t getting the question.

Finally, she asked if I was throwing away her books.

???

No, Mom.  Your books are all going into boxes and into storage.  I don’t throw out books.

I don’t know how many times I’ve told her that her stuff is all being boxed and going into storage.  Obviously, she doesn’t believe me.  She seems utterly convinced I’m going to throw it all away, or someone is going to come steal it from the shed.

So, she asked, you brought all this stuff in the move, and now you’re throwing it away?

What???

I had a really hard time wrapping my mind around what she was asking me.  Especially with her changing gears like that.  Did she really think we were taking our own belongings to the dump?

No, Mom.  Garbage.  We take garbage to the garbage dump.

What garbage?  Why aren’t we burning it?

Because not everything can be burned?  I kept feeling like it was some kind of trick question.

I think have figured it out, though.  When my mother was on the farm, garbage (meaning anything that couldn’t be used again, or couldn’t be fed to the animals) went into the burn barrel.  At least, that’s how she remembers it.  We did go to the dump.  I remember the dump runs, even though I rarely went along on them.  Back then, the dump was, literally, a dump.  Everything went into one area until it got pushed into big piles and burned.  People were free to wander through it and salvage what they wanted.  There was no recycling area.  I don’t even think things like appliances were set aside, and certainly not anything electrical.  I recall my late brother salvaging a radio.  It worked fine, but had been close to the flames.  The volume button had melted and could not be turned anymore, so there was only one volume choice.  Loud.  Which made it perfect for in the workshop, where it could be heard over the sound of running equipment.

I remember my later brother and I finding a huge pile of Seagram’s Five Star Whiskey bottles, with their plastic stars on them.  It was like finding a treasure!  We took off as many of those stars as we could and brought them home.

I’m amazed my dad let us do that, now that I think about it. :-D  I’m pretty sure we used them to throw at each other, like ninja throwing stars, or something.  Not that we knew what ninjas or throwing stars even where, back then, but that wouldn’t have stopped us from coming up with the idea ourselves.

I wonder how we ever survived our childhoods?  We did some really stupid, dangerous things, when we were little!

I don’t know that my mother ever went to the dump with us.  I think, to her memory, the only reason anyone would go to the dump would be to through out big things, like furniture, or things in large quantities… like her books.

Still, how she leapt from thinking I was taking her books to the dump, to thinking I was throwing away our own belongings, I can’t quite figure out.  Does she think we brought garbage with us?  Or that our stuff is garbage?

Granted, she’s never had a very high opinion of me or my capabilities, so it’s an easy thing for her to make these sorts of assumptions.  I sometimes wonder why she ever asked me to come live here.  Ah, well.  Some things will never change.

The rest of the conversation was much less confusing.  We also finally worked out a date and time for me to visit her.  All these months we’ve been here, and I’ve seen my mother only the two times she came here to visit.  I have yet to visit her.  But it’s on both our calendars, now, so we’ve got a lunch date!

When she first called, I also mentioned the deer were out our window, and she later asked me to bring her some pictures.  I’ve started to go through some of them and am putting together a file folder for her.  I’ll get a few printed out when I get a chance.  I think I will borrow my daughter’s laptop or something, so I can bring a thumb drive and show her more, including some of the videos I’ve taken.  In all the years she lived here, I don’t think she ever really saw live deer.  There were just too many people around the house and yard.  She sounds almost wistful when I talk to her about them.  So I want to pick some really nice shots to print out for her.

After our call, I brought the van over to the house so we could load it up with our garbage and recycling (including bags from cleaning out the cat litter; something else that can’t go to the burn barrel, and it’s not like we can compost it or anything).  This is the first time I’ve taken the van into the yard since the big snowfall.

I have good tires on that van. :-D

Just a bit of spinning, but I didn’t get stuck anywhere.

I was also going to go to the post office for the parcel pick up I didn’t get yesterday, because I’d come in while it was closed for lunch break.

I was positive it was open on Saturdays.

Thankfully, I keep the hours up on the wall near the entryway, and stopped to check before I headed out.

Nope.  They are not open today.

I’m thinking it must be my marriage certificate.  Since the certificate, with both married and unmarried names on them, is the large, framing size, it wouldn’t be able to fit in our mailbox.

I wish I’d thought of that earlier.  I’d have made the second trip to the post office to get it.

Ah, well.

I’d say the rest of the day went quietly, but after three more phone calls, two of them more than an hour long, “quiet” isn’t the term I would use.  It was good to catch up with people, though.   One was with someone I haven’t spoken to since before we moved, so that was really nice.

If you saw my first post of the day, with our strange fruits hanging out the master bedroom window, you saw some of the other silliness of the day.  It ended with some more cat silliness this evening.

DahBoy does love that piano.  He loves to hunch down on it like that…

… and watch us.

With those eyes… and that intent gaze.

Okay, so maybe that’s more creepy than silly! :-D

At least his pride seems to have survived is failure to jump onto the window ledge this morning! :-D

The Re-Farmer