Tending My Parent’s Coal Stove

…is the opposite of sowing one’s wild oats. Observations while house-sitting for my rents:

• They have a magazine titled Reminisce. The tagline is gold; “The magazine that brings back the good times”. I picked it up, quizzically, and thumbed through it. The first headline that caught my eye read “Milk Delivery by Bobsled”. There is also an article documenting the history of matches.
• There are several clocks that chime but they all chime at different times. The longer I stay here, the worse it seems to be getting.
• Cable is overrated. HBO even more so.
• I felt a twinge of nostalgia and when mixed with a few glasses of wine it brought me to some old photo albums*. We have a baby book filled with tiny treasures, including a few locks of my baby curls wrapped in saran wrap (creepy baby hair!). The best treasure of all is the entry my mother wrote under the section Baby’s First Day Home.  “1/24/1986: First night home we had a black out. Everyone slept in the living room which was heated by the kitchen gas stove. Katie thought she had been born into a family of sharecroppers.” 

*Photo albums are like tagged photos on Facebook, but you can hold them.