The College, er, MiddleAge Days

I had a realization tonight.

We have hit middle age-- one of us has the AARP card to prove it--and we live like college students. Our lifestyle has regressed.

We have downsized a 4 bedroom house into a 2 bedroom apartment.

Our bikes are parked in the lving room. They are used often enough to make it too large of an effort to wheel them clear through the apartment to their niche beside the storage shed on the patio.

The placemats are folded over the back of one of the unused chairs at the dining room table. Too much trouble to wash them if someone spills, easier to wipe the table.

The tablecloth is...I don't remember where the tablecloth is. It was here when I moved in. But sometime over the months it disappeared to the laundry room and never returned.

The dishwasher is as much storage as it is utility.

There are more Pepsi cans than milk cartons in the recycling bin.

There is an unhung picture leaning on the fireplace mantel. There has been one or another leaning there for months.

I consider dusting a task to do when company is expected. Maybe. When the queen drops in for tea or something.

If I wanted to mop the floor, I would have to dust off the mop first.

We ate pizza in front of the TV tonight. Not even homemade pizza. Unbaked pizzas we hauled home in a cooler from Arni's in Lafayette and stored in the freezer for later times. Like a care package from a mom to her campus kid.

I used to keep a perfectly ordered house where dust feared to tread and there were fresh flowers on the table (from my own well maintained gardens). I imagined it would become much easier, and still very important, to do when our children were grown and the house was no longer filled with the messiness of family life.

The truth is, fresh cut flowers make me sneeze and dust only bothers me if I bother it first. I like the picture unhung, it's easy to change the scenery of my day this way. And under the tablecloth there lurked a beautiful natural wood finish on the dining table--that doesn't have to go into the washing machine to be cleaned.

The house has been traded in for an apartment and it turns out biking is highly enjoyable when you're not worried about the child wobbling in front of or behind you.
And pizza truly is better when it's eaten in front of the TV.