A Weekend at the Farmhouse

Friday was a rainy day in New Hampshire, but in between the showers we still managed to play outside for most of the morning and part of the afternoon. Lucia and Andrew played baseball (and Lucia actually hit the ball with the bat a few times). Greta threw stones into puddles and splashed maniacally. Lucia threw stones into the pond. Later, when it got too chilly and damp to be outside, Lucia found a bunch of ancient kitchen tools in a drawer and used them to play doctor, testing our reflexes with a honey-stir thing, looking in our ears with an old metal whisk, giving us shots with a wine-bottle-stopper, and “scooping us” (whatever that means) with a tiny metal scoop. Her favorite TV show these days is “Doc McStuffins,” about a little girl who mends her stuffed animals’ injuries, and this has really sparked her pretend-doctor imagination.

We ate dinner by candlelight—“It’s like a birthday!” Lucia said—and then enjoyed a quiet (and chilly) evening once the girls were in bed. I wrote and read; Andrew embarked on a new hobby: reupholstering an old chair he found in the barn. He’s in the very beginning stages of removing over a hundred nails and fasteners from the existing (mouse-destroyed) upholstery. (Or perhaps he’s simply been in the back room bagging up mouse skeletons from the chair’s interior—I told him not to tell me what he found once he began his disassembly.)

We're here for the long Memorial Day weekend. As usual, we feel separated from real life, ensconced in a place where we hear only raindrops, where Lucia laughs hysterically at her rainboots’ tendency to fall off while she’s swinging, where both girls find high hilarity in Greta’s squealing, lightning-fast attempts to climb up the stairs, and where we’re as likely to be sitting in a chair (allegedly) from the Mayflower as we are to be watching “Sofia the First” on the iPad.

Oh, and we have no heat—the oil tank is empty—and tomorrow is supposed to be in the 40s. In other words, it’s just another weekend at the farmhouse.