It was a wonderful place.
It had old wooden floors with wide beams.
Some of the beams had knots in the wood that I tried to peer into on many occasions.
As a young girl, I was sure that the holes in the wood went down to some secret tunnel.

This wonderful place was a drug store.
Not like CVS, Rite Aid, and Walgreens today, this was an old-fashioned apothecary shop.
I was just a little girl when I went into the store with my mother.
I loved the way my shoes clicked against the wood floor as we walked to the counter.

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I walk through my laundry room every morning.
My back stairs come down into my laundry room, which is attached to my kitchen.
I love to do laundry.
For some strange reason, there is great satisfaction in seeing the dirty clothes get clean.

Like other rooms in my house, there are little country signs in my laundry room.
There is a picture of an Amish clothesline that a friend gave to me.
She knows how much I love Amish clotheslines.
The colors of the simple clothes, waving gently in the breeze, always catches my eye.

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Wednesday is our trash day.
The trash and recycling have to be put out the night before since our trash men come so early.
I am grateful to these two men who faithfully take our trash away each week.
When I see them on my walk, I wave to them.

If my husband is away on business, I am the one who puts the trash out the night before.
When I put the trash out this week, I thought of my sons.
Taking the trash out to the end of the driveway was always their job.
You would think that since there were two of them, they would take turns.

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It was time to change the shower curtain liner in our hall bathroom.
It has to be changed periodically.
I made a mental note to do that when my daughter went back to college.
I always keep spare liners in my linen closet.

Our master bathroom has a glass shower door.
The two other bathrooms upstairs have shower curtains.
I wanted to change the liner the day I cleaned that bathroom.
However, I had already mopped the floors and needed to wait until they were dry.

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I remember the day like it was yesterday.
I was shopping with my mother.
It was the days before malls.
It was the days of the department store.

I loved to ride the escalator.
It was a pastime my children somehow inherited from me.
I would ask to ride up the one side and down the other.
Eventually, I was allowed to do that by myself as my mother waited at the bottom.

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My son has been married for one month.
Right before their month anniversary, his wife celebrated a birthday.
I had a present for her.
They live an hour away; I was hoping that I would see them to give it to her in person.

Newlywed life is quite busy.
My son and his wife love to sing and play worship music together.
One weekend, in their first month of marriage, they were asked to sing at a friend’s wedding.
Another week, they volunteered with a ministry my son was part of all through college.

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When my husband and I bought our first house, we had very little furniture.
We splurged and bought a new bedroom set before we were married to be delivered later.
We had a few pieces in our family room that we brought from our apartment.
However, most of our house was empty and would stay that way for quite a while.

My husband went to Georgia Tech for his undergraduate degree.
He was in a fraternity, in fact, he was the president of the fraternity in his senior year.
He brought his desk chair from college to the apartment we rented.
He lived in the apartment for four months before our wedding.

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My oldest daughter worked for a camp when she was sixteen years old.
She loved her first job, which was every day from 9-12:30.
The job left her afternoons free.
However, often she would babysit for a few families.

When it came time for my second daughter to get her first job, she wanted to do something different.
She babysat as well but she wanted to actually report to work.
She wanted to know what it was like to have a work schedule.
She wanted to know what it was like to work for someone else.

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Anyone who grew up watching westerns on TV remembers the cowboy riding off into the sunset.
The cowboy captures the bad guys.
The cowboy saves the day.
Not living near a cattle ranch or any official cowboys, those stories are just stories to me.

However, I know that true cowboys do exist.
They probably live out West or on a ranch in Texas.
They are hard working.
They love the land and love their animals.

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I watched him walk past the machine.
He walked by it and then came back.
I knew what he wanted.
I had to continue watching him to see if I was right.

I have used the machine myself when my little crock is filled with coins.
When it is filled to the brim with nickels, dimes, and quarters, I take it to the machine.
The machine counts my coins.
It is loud as the coins fall into the appropriate slots in order to be counted.

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