The other day, my neighbor, Katie, referred to these Musings as my blog.  Let me be perfectly clear: this is not a blog.  If this were a blog, you would come to it rather than it coming to you, and I'm afraid that wouldn't provide me with enough control.  Also, "Blog" implies something by someone who knows what they're doing with technology.  That is not me.

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Late Saturday night/early Sunday morning - 2:35, to be precise -  L---- woke up.  He was convinced that he had not yet fallen asleep and that G---- had forgotten to put his music on to help him fall asleep.  G---- staggered in and turned the music on (synthesizers with crickets chirping and the like).  At 4:30, I noticed the light was on under L----'s door.  I opened it up.  He didn't hear me for the fan on high on the table near his head, but there he was, in bed reading his coffee-table-sized book on flight: Otto Lillienthal, the Wright Brothers, Amelia Earhart, and Chuck Yeager.  At 6:00 precisely (he'd been watching the clock in his room), he came in and G---- got up with him.  We biked in the morning, he swam off and on all afternoon.  At 6:00 last night, he sat next to G---- on our deck, leafing through the same book, when we noticed he was listing.  We put him to bed a few minutes later. 

Something about this has me thinking we are having a successful summer.  A successful summer is one where someone can just wake up in the middle of the night to read, and where someone can fall asleep slumped against his dad in the balmy evening air.  One summer when I was L----'s age, we lived on Beach Street in Sharon, Massachusetts.  It was ungodly hot.  No one felt like going to bed because the bedrooms were even hotter.  We sat in a small room off the kitchen that had some screens on the windows.  Someone had the idea that we should eat cantaloupe.  My mom got it out of the 'fridge, cut it open and reached for a spoon.  "What are those?" I squawked, pointing.  "The seeds," my mom said.  "Seeds?!"  It blew my mind.  Who knew?  Seeds!  We were having a successful summer, all - even my dad - gathered around our formica-topped kitchen, eating cold cantaloupe with salt on it at 10:00 at night with bedtime nowhere in sight.

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Were people who lived a hundred years ago better at putting things away after they used them?

Did people who lived a hundred years ago really wash all their dishes before going to bed at night?

Did people who lived a hundred years ago keep their houses as clean as some of us strive to these days?  (As with the blog, this is something I am not terribly guilty of.)