Day Dreaming of Simpler Times

Sometimes I thoroughly dislike being a grown up. I puttered around the house all day today doing grown-up things. Things like cleaning the toilets; changing the sheets; doing the laundry; vacuuming; sending that e-mail I've been procrastinating about; cleaning the "deposits" out of the litter box; combing the cat, so I don't have to clean up the nasty hairballs he will deposit on my floors if I don't, and on and on and on.....All the stage management that goes on behind the scenes in any household. The things no-one [of the male gender at least] realizes need doing until they're not done.....

My mother was much better at it than I. I think I must take after my Auntie Bid, in whom the scatterbrain gene was dominant. My mother would tell us stories of how Auntie Bid never came straight home from school. She meandered up every lane and by-way, stopping in at farmhouses and roadside cottages to chat with the neighbours, and having cups of tea.

Meanwhile my mother, the responsible big sister, pedaled mutinously home on her bicycle with no detours, to milk the cows.

Even as a child I thought Auntie Bid was the one who had her priorities straight.What were my uncles, their brothers, for if not to milk the cows?

If my mother and Auntie Bid were to rise from the dead and land on my doorstep tomorrow morning I'd be more than happy to hand the reins of the household over to my mother and go gallivanting with Auntie Bid.

What are the chances do you think?