It’s that time of year again–you can feel it in the air. The leaves are cleaned up and slowly the decorations are appearing out of nowhere. each street is slowly lit up, indicating that the season is upon us once more.

Did I say the leaves were cleaned up? I walk past my front yard every day and say, “I should get out here and clean up this mess.” The problem is that I don’t have any trees in my yard, but the neighbors do and the wind whips through like a tunnel guiding everyone else’s leaves into my garden.

They don’t seem to move on once they get here, and just wrap themselves around my plants and stay right there.

Once I get them cleaned up, then I will start putting up my Christmas decorations, but I’ll start tomorrow. First I have to put the porch furniture in the garage for the winter. But before that, I have to get rid of the stuff that has been piling up in the garage. God forbid I should actually keep my car in there–there just isn’t room. I will try to put as much stuff in the garbage can as will fit, including old leaky hoses, a basketball with no air and some springs to an old chair seat. What on earth was I saving that for?

Now there’s no room for the bagged stuff from inside the house. Oh well, it can wait until next week. I’ll just throw it in a corner in the garage. The porch furniture will take the space where my car should be, with a path leading from the door to the freezer.

After the porch get cleaned off, I will try to remember where I put my lighted boughs to tie onto the porch railings. Then I realize that they are stored IN THE GARGAGE–not up front and handy, but in the back, stacked underneath all the other seasonal stuff that I have already taken down, except for the fall stuff which lays out on the front porch on one of the chairs I haven’t put away yet.

That particular chair has been broken since the Fourth of July and needs to be trashed but I am not paying the garbage man extra money to take it away. I’ve tried to saw it into small pieces intermittently since July. It’s just plastic but I cannot seem to break it up. Finally after much thought, I decided to use my little handy dandy jigsaw on it; that should take care of it.

As I look for the jigsaw I know I used it earlier on, I just don’t know where I put it. It’s in the garage somewhere!

Now… back to the lighted boughs. I stand there with my hands on my hips wondering which box is which. I do try to be organized and have even marked on the boxes what is in them. spy my green boughs, and of course it is in the middle section. Now to get to it, I have to move the rototiller out of the way. I was going to crawl up and over it, but decided that if I fell, no one would find me for days, so I use common sense and try to pull it out of the way. A tomato cage is wrapped around it, along with a fishing net. I struggle to pull them apart. Finally it comes free and I am able to move the tiller.

Still I must climb up on a plastic milk carrier and pull the box from its precarious location. Before I ascend I notice that my mailbox cover is just hanging there, waiting for me to pull it down, get it in shape and put it out on the mailbox. I wonder to myself if my mail lady appreciates my efforts or not. She never leaves a note in my mailbox telling me how beautiful it is. I may or may not get that down this year.

I feel lucky just getting the boughs down from their perch. I pull them out of the box and throw them over the porch railing and go into the house for a cup of warm coffee–it’s cold out there. I should have started this project earlier, but I figured I have plenty of time.

I have other things I must attend to, like looking for the bargains I bought after Christmas last year. It’s always a surprise to me when I find them. I don’t remember buying them, but at the time I felt I could not pass up the bargain. Besides, I have something for on the porch in those bags. Now where did I leave them?

I am determined not to get side tracked and finish what I started, which was… “Oh look, the neighbors across the street have turned on their Christmas lights, how pretty! My gosh it’s dark.” I have to go in and fix supper. I’ll finish this tomorrow.