The people living in this house

First day of chores at home. I was a bit nervous of being too sick for peak performance, as I've been fighting off a cold I caught from Bernie, but fortunately today the body aches were gone and left me with only a head full of mucous to contend with. Today we washed all the windows in the house, inside and out, and scrubbed the shutters back to their forest green. We also hacked away at the wisteria that climbs over the lattice on the side of the porch. It is quite lovely and makes for a beautiful winding screen, but it grows so fast that it has to be pruned back every few weeks lest it consume the whole deck. There's still a fair bit of landscaping to be done, as my dad is too busy these days to keep up with it like he used to. I keep telling him to just hire a high school kid for like fifteen bucks an hour to just keep on top of things like the weeding and the power washing and redoing the stain on the fence, but for some reason he's resistant. Probably afraid they wouldn't do it exactly how he wants. The house and yard are probably too big for just my mom and dad alone there anymore, but the place has been so molded to their lives and interests by now-- the vegetable gardens, the radio antenna, the personally-designed kitchen, the little library, the artist's studio, the brewery in the basement. It reminds me of the way in visual storytelling forms like cinema you tell your audience about your characters not with words but with images. You get a pretty neat picture of who my parents are just from looking at this house. They have done a lot of living in it, and I like to see the signs.