Small-town Saturday. I'll take it!

So. This is how the rest of the world lives. After spending the better part of the past few months of Saturdays at track meets near and far – mostly far, and many of them hundreds of miles of maroon van driving away – I found myself at home with my family today. Well, not my whole family. Heidi was down in Florida to see our niece graduate from high school. So, it has been a 4-day fun fest of Daddy and The Kids (the Saleks saw this first-hand for a few moments on Friday afternoon!). Mostly, it has been great NOT to have to go anywhere far away, or with the echo of a starter’s pistol and clanking of hurdles, on this day. Don’t get me wrong. I love what I do and with whom I do it. The teams are my family, and traveling with them hardly classifies as “work” by the traditional standards. But I love my actual family a lot, too, and I do miss them when I am wherever I am that is not home.

And so it was with gratitude that I experienced the simply mundane things of a small-town Saturday: Yard sale signs; high school football team car wash (side note: What a hoot! Anyone who knows my car realizes what a colossal waste of time a car wash would be for that sticker-laden piece of junk); more yard sale signs; a packed Home Depot garden center; more yard sale signs; a fun “hobby day” sponsored by our elementary school PTA, at the historic Hyde Park train station; more yard sale signs; Stewart’s coffee (of course); more yard sale signs (oh! I just realized that today was something called the “town-wide garage sale,’’ in which such behavior was encouraged). Heidi, a fine connoisseur of garage sale/tag sale/yard sale treasures (junk?), surely missed this as she sweated it out down in the Fort Myers sun.

So yeah. A Saturday at home. What a concept. Next Saturday is graduation, so it won’t be the leisurely small-town Saturday. It will be an emotional cap-and-gown day as we formally and finally say goodbye to a group that quite honestly I am not ready to see depart Poughkeepsie. After that, our weekends start filling up with other little tasks and trips. So today, being home with not much to do but take care of the kids and attend to little errands here and there … I’ll take it.