It has recently occurred to me that for the rest of my life, this time now will be "that last summer."

I will turn to Jonathan years from now and say, "Remember that last summer in Colorado when we stuffed ourselves with Pueblo corn because we knew it would be the last?" or "Well, Tris moved to Alaska that last summer we were in Colorado, so that would have been 2022" or "Remember that last summer when we kept getting rid of furniture so that we ate off smaller and smaller tables until finally we only had a kitchen stool in the dining room and then finally at the end we had nothing but picnics on our futon on the floor?"

The contractor has now finished the repair work in the basement. His baby was born 10 days ago, between two of his residencies here. It is a little boy -- everyone is healthy and happy and sleep-deprived, as is customary. This means that we have been working on this house so long that children have actually come into the world during the process. No word yet on whether our new little contractor will be named after me. I am sure they are probably thinking about it, though! Fingers crossed!

There is new beige carpet in the boys' old bedroom, completely changing the quality of the light in there. The house painters will be here next week and paint all the walls beige, which is apparently what home buyers these days want in a house. I find this depressing and also, as a cultural sociologist, an important clue to the general psyche of the American populace. People who would want to live in an all-beige house would absolutely elect far-right fascists to office. The cruelty is the point.

As I write, hidden away in a corner, the hardwood floor is being refinished. It was supposed to happen last week, but the head refinisher had to have some kidney stones out. It's the whole circle of life around here. 

While the finish on the floors is drying, we are not able to walk on them, which means our access to our only bathroom is cut off. For two days. We have bought an 8-foot 4x4 beam which we intend to use as a bridge between the kitchen (which we can reach through the back door) and the bathroom. At first, we thought about just trying to leap across the distance, but even with a running start and an empty bladder, the reality of inadvertently slamming into the projecting corner of the basement stairwell and crumbling into a heap on the (presumably) sticky hardwood hallway floor and being stuck there until EMTs pried me up using (again, presumably) some sort of very large crowbar was, well, off-putting.

"Remember that last summer in Colorado," Jonathan will say, "when we had to have the floors refinished twice?"