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1WholeHouseLibrary
Since I can't find the original, as I apparently posted it as a message to someone (who has since either archived or deleted it); and since I've mentioned it in an Off-Topic thread; and since (now) people are asking about it...
I'm posting it here, in its present incarnation, but reformatted to be in compliance with LibraryThing html-ish restrictions. There are 2 footnotes that appear in the text. Normally, they'd be at the bottom of the page, but I placed them immediately below the text they reference. Without further ado...
The Wind Chime Story
When he was still living at home, my oldest son slept in the back corner bedroom on the second floor of our house. One set of windows looked out into the back yard, from which he had a mostly obscured view due to the way the Live Oak trees grew. They grow more like still-flaccid boiled spaghetti floating in a Zero Gravity environment. Sorry, that’s the best analogy I can think of. Branches of the same tree will twist around each other to fight for dominance. They behave like the Whomping Willow at Hogwarts, but do so at the pace of Middle Earth’s Ents.
My wife and I are very fond of each other. It’s a second marriage for both of us, and we have a tendency to encourage each other’s whimsy. That’s how she ended up becoming a Librarian, and why we have as many books as we do. We also happen to like the sound of wind chimes – not those high-pitched, breaking-glass-sounding ones, but the mellow-toned, notice-every-reverberation sort. So of course, we bought one. The longest pipe is maybe 18” of anodized aluminum, perhaps an inch or slightly more in diameter, but the sound – light, airy, resonant. The ideal place to hang it in the back yard was about 10 feet from the house, mid-way across the back. However, that’s not where the branch was, so it’s more like 10 feet off-center towards the corner where my son’s bedroom was.
The sound of the wind chimes is delightful when there’s enough of a breeze to get them going. When breeze is lacking, of course, they’re silent. And when there’s much more than a breeze coming through, I’d remove the wind-catchers just to keep the neighbors from complaining. It had the opposite effect. They like to hear the wind chimes also, and they’d gauge the optimum kite-flying-ness of a day by how much noise our wind chimes would make, so they want us to keep the wind-catchers ON!
My oldest son, on the other hand, never complained unless the subject was brought up. By sheer coincidence, it was the day he moved out. The conversation went this way, more or less:
footnote #1:
Identities are protected here – proper names are substituted meaningful referentials in italics. The term ‘Dad’ does not apply.
end-footnote
“Dad, can I borrow the truck for a couple of hours?”
“Sure, #1 Son, no problem. What do you need it for?
footnote #2:
About thirty years earlier, I made the exact same reply to my then-wife (substitute #1 Son with Thorn-in-My-Side though) when, after having a private discussion with her mother, and now late in the evening, she asked me for $20. The verbal lashing I got from the both of them – WOW! I don’t remember exactly where I slept that night, but I vaguely recall the heady aroma of spruce boughs and damp, loamy earth.
end-footnote
“Well, Dad, I’m moving into a house with a few of my friends and my car won’t fit a bed or dresser in it.”
“Sure. You know where the keys are. Be careful backing it out of the garage.”
“No problemo, Pop! I’ll even fill up the gas tank before I bring it back.”
“Actually son, you’re going to have to put gas in it before you get to where you’re going, because it was sucking fumes when I came home from work yesterday.”
“Thanks for letting me know. As long as I don’t have to hear those !@#$% wind chimes anymore, I’d even wash your truck with my tongue!”
The rest of the conversation would add little to the story, so I’ll get right to the point. My oldest son HATES wind chimes in much the same way that fellow in “The Jerk” hates oil cans. All those years, and he never complained once – not even when we gave him the little tiny ones from the Boy Scout shop the day he had his Eagle Court of Honor. All that time I thought it was that he was overwhelmed by everything going on that day!
Eventually, he moved out, and a year or so later, #2 Son moved out. #3 Son moved into the bedroom geographically furthest from the back yard – preferring the sound of the trains a mere hundred yards away, to the “din” of the wind chimes. My wife and I enjoyed the wind chimes even more.
My wife likes to shop. We go to bookstores, antique shops and bead shops. She’ll shop anywhere except the grocery store – just absolutely HATES it. So, we’re at one of those you-must-have-money-bulging-out-of-you-pockets stores in a town about 8 miles north of us. This is the kind of store where you find a little purple velvet-lined wooden box to store a precious ring in, and the box costs more than the ring. This is the store where you find those chunks of glass illuminated from a pedestal beneath it and you see a delicate etching of a Portuguese Man-of-War in the middle of it, and you wonder how they did that. This is the kind of store that has wind chimes!
It was a couple of months before Holiday and we didn’t really have any debt other than the mortgage. After much deliberation as to where in the yard it might go and how we’d suspend it, as an early holiday gift to each other, we bought another set of wind chimes. This was actually going to be our fourth set of wind chimes. Our purchase went on my credit card, and we were instructed to drive around back to receive the crated pipes. Around back, a man guided me to a spot nowhere near the loading dock, handed me a pair of red, plastic flags and told me to wait right there. He checked the air pressure in my tires, added some to the rear left side, and about 5 minutes later, a fork lift came at me from behind, real fast, dropped a box across the top of the bed of the truck, and just as quickly, disappeared. The fellow said, “That box ain’t gonna shift none, so no need t’ tie it down, but y’all gonna have to fix them there flags to the sides so’s you don’t get arrested.” Then he walked off, but turned around just long enough to say, “OH! And have a nice day!”
It was a slow drive home, and once we got there I rigged some pulleys, strong ropes and a gadget called a ‘come-along’ together to get the box off the truck. We hid the wind chimes in a closet in the garage, and I got out the work lights and set them up in the back yard. Holiday was only 2 months away, and I needed to work on the ‘placement’ aspect of our purchase.
With the work lights set up for the desired effect, our electric bill doubled while the branches of the Live Oak tree clamored their way to the 24-hour Sun-simulator I had set up. Every day I’d go out and lop off the ‘volunteer’ branchlets and ‘loser’ branches, and finally ended up with one that was exactly where I wanted it and had enough girth that it could support the weight of the wind chimes that would be suspended beneath it.
Around Fowl-featuring-holiday, I happened to be talking to my mother on the phone, as she lives far beyond reasonable hollering-distance, and she was lamenting the fact that she had absolutely nothing planned for Holiday – the one that comes about a month after Fowl-featuring-holiday. I swear I don’t know how it happened, but before we hung up (30 seconds later; she’s apparently familiar with the Internet), she had booked a flight from her State to mine, and she was going to be staying for a WEEK. For some reason, my wife didn’t think this was a bad thing, although agreed that a week was probably stretching things a bit, especially since I was on a big project at work and wasn’t getting any time off since Holiday occurred on a weekend that year.
My mother arrived the Humpday before Holiday, on time, and my wife and I were there, on time, to greet her. My mother also happens to read a lot, so of course, we talked about what each of us was reading. Coincidentally, my mother and I happened to be reading different books about the same subject – civility – and she then went into this discourse about how horribly rude and inconsiderate car drivers were, and people cutting in line in front of her at the supermarket, etc. After that day, I didn’t see anything related to the subject matter we had both been reading.
Four looooooooonnnnnnnnnggggggggg days pass; it’s Holiday Day. #1 Son and #2 Son come for breakfast – big breakfast – lots of breakfasty type foods and gallons of coffee. They have a tight schedule. They have 7 mothers to visit – the one that gave birth to them, and the moms of 6 friends of theirs that treated them more like a mom than their own (mother). And, I’m grateful to all of them. We finally get round to opening presents. In very short order, we’re down to just one leaning against the wall. My wife and I invited the boys to open it, because we already know what it is. All 3 of them dragged it to the center of the Living Room, and proceed to go at it with hammers and crowbars and a cat’s paws and banding scissors, and #1 Son begins to feel somewhat apprehensive as they finally get the box to yield a little. My mother is quite curious at this point, edging close and closer for a look. There was a chorus of “OH NO!” from the boys as they pulled back the stuffing to reveal the pipes within. It was an unusual “oh no”, only in that it was in perfect Doric harmony, something which I could have not possibly taught them, because I am bereft of a singing voice. So I credit their mother for this phenomenon. #1 Son was now looking at me as if I was the Devil incarnate. He was positively nauseated. This was NOTHING compared to the reaction his grandmother had though.
“NO! DON’T TAKE IT OUT OF THE BOX! I DON’T BELIEVE THIS! I JUST… Yours Truly WHAT? AND YOU, Mrs. Truly! WHAT WERE YOU THINKING? TAKE IT BACK! TAKE IT BACK THIS VERY INSTANT! HOW COULD YOU, Yours Truly? ARE YOU INSANE? WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH YOU? WHERE DO YOU THINK YOU’RE GOING TO PUT THAT THING? NOWHERE, I’M TELLING YOU BECAUSE IT’S GOING BACK TO THE STORE TODAY, AND DON’T YOU THINK DIFFERENT. WHAT ARE THE – NO! GET IT OUT OF HERE RIGHT NOW. YOUR NEIGHGBORS ARE GOING TO HATE YOU AND I DON’T BLAME THEM ONE BIT! Yours Truly, THIS HAS GOT TO BE THE STUPIDEST THING YOU’VE EVER DONE. I DON’T BELIVE THIS! WHAT’S THE NAME OF THE OWNER OF THE STORE? I’M GOING TO CALL HIM RIGHT NOW AND DEMAND THAT HE TAKE IT BACK IMMEDIATELY. I DON’T CARE IF YOU EVER GET YOUR MONEY BACK. GET RID OF THIS THING, NOW! ...Or words to that effect. I mean, I don’t remember it verbatim; it was a few years ago, and the echoes aren’t nearly as strong as they were last April, even.
The thing is, she carried on like that for a good 45 minutes. I really thought she was going to pop a vein in her temple. #1 Son was quite disturbed by her behavior. He excused himself, retrieved a ladder from the shed in the back yard, dragged the wind chimes out to the back yard, tied a rubber mat around the tree limb, and with sheer brute strength (probably the adrenaline from my mother’s ongoing ranting), lifted the wind chimes up on to the hook, and then put the ladder away. He's never put anything away in his life, so I could tell he was bothered. I attached the wind catcher, and we began to unwrap the pipes. The longest was 5 feet and perhaps 3, maybe 3 and a half inches in diameter, and there were 6 pipes all together. My mother was still inside, ranting, but the rest of us were outside staring in awe and amazement at the wind chimes. My wife looked at me in a way that suggested that perhaps, her mother-in-law may have a valid point!
And then it happened. A gentle breeze wafted its way through the yard, overcame the resistance of the wind catcher, and a single note played. It’s a big wind chime; it plays low notes; the kind of notes that cause screws to back out of wood all by themselves. Four minutes later, you could still hear it. Last-month-of-the-year is not particularly windy or cold (usually) in central Formerly-largest-State- in-the-Union, so this note didn’t have much competition, save for my mother’s still-just-as-forceful ravings alone by herself in the Living Room. The rest of us just stood around in the back yard, smiling, mesmerized by that one note. But eventually another, stronger breeze came along, and soon there were several notes going all at once and the reverberation was so appealing that we didn’t care that all of our body cells were realigning themselves to the harmonic ambiance.
Eventually, even my mother felt and heard it, inside the house, and she stopped ranting to listen. She finally opened the back door, and just stood there for a while. Then she came and joined us as we stood there and grinned at each other, not particularly caring about deadlines or schedules or empty coffee mugs. My mother leaned over to me and whispered in my ear, “They sound beautiful, but your neighbors are going to ~HATE~ you forever,” and then she jabbed me in the ribs with one of those long bony fingers of hers and went back inside the house.
Three looooooooonnnnnnnnnggggggggg days later, it was Humpday morning, and my mother had to catch her plane home. I secretly wondered why she hadn’t just saved the airfare, and commuted by broom. There were other, not as outrageous, but even more upsetting episodes during those days, but they’re stories for another time, maybe. Stephen King has been bugging me for them.
As I said before, Last-month-of-the-year is not particularly windy or cold (usually) in central Formerly-largest-State-in-the-Union, so I felt it was worth repeating here, because what it ~IS~ particular with is: fog. Go figure! Pea soup has less viscosity. We left early. The airport my mother had arrived at closed (forever) while she was visiting, and the new airport was in business for only about 4 days. It was further away, and I had never been there before. We traveled at, for the conditions, a dangerous 15 mph all the way to the new airport. It was a long drive, but not so much that I would exaggerate the word ‘long’. For some reason, my wife wasn’t ready in time to see my mother off, so she had to stay behind on this trip.
We talked about fog. We talked about previous occasions of having either driven in fog, or a third-hand story of someone else’s experience of having driven in fog. If the talk varied even one iota from the topic, the variance was interrupted and returned to: fog.
I left my mother and her bag at the curb in front of the terminal, and drove off. And that is why my mother is never coming to visit us again – because I didn’t kiss her goodbye.
Edited to fix the extended "long"s. Apparently, there's a 40 character limit on a single word.
I'm posting it here, in its present incarnation, but reformatted to be in compliance with LibraryThing html-ish restrictions. There are 2 footnotes that appear in the text. Normally, they'd be at the bottom of the page, but I placed them immediately below the text they reference. Without further ado...
The Wind Chime Story
When he was still living at home, my oldest son slept in the back corner bedroom on the second floor of our house. One set of windows looked out into the back yard, from which he had a mostly obscured view due to the way the Live Oak trees grew. They grow more like still-flaccid boiled spaghetti floating in a Zero Gravity environment. Sorry, that’s the best analogy I can think of. Branches of the same tree will twist around each other to fight for dominance. They behave like the Whomping Willow at Hogwarts, but do so at the pace of Middle Earth’s Ents.
My wife and I are very fond of each other. It’s a second marriage for both of us, and we have a tendency to encourage each other’s whimsy. That’s how she ended up becoming a Librarian, and why we have as many books as we do. We also happen to like the sound of wind chimes – not those high-pitched, breaking-glass-sounding ones, but the mellow-toned, notice-every-reverberation sort. So of course, we bought one. The longest pipe is maybe 18” of anodized aluminum, perhaps an inch or slightly more in diameter, but the sound – light, airy, resonant. The ideal place to hang it in the back yard was about 10 feet from the house, mid-way across the back. However, that’s not where the branch was, so it’s more like 10 feet off-center towards the corner where my son’s bedroom was.
The sound of the wind chimes is delightful when there’s enough of a breeze to get them going. When breeze is lacking, of course, they’re silent. And when there’s much more than a breeze coming through, I’d remove the wind-catchers just to keep the neighbors from complaining. It had the opposite effect. They like to hear the wind chimes also, and they’d gauge the optimum kite-flying-ness of a day by how much noise our wind chimes would make, so they want us to keep the wind-catchers ON!
My oldest son, on the other hand, never complained unless the subject was brought up. By sheer coincidence, it was the day he moved out. The conversation went this way, more or less:
footnote #1:
Identities are protected here – proper names are substituted meaningful referentials in italics. The term ‘Dad’ does not apply.
end-footnote
“Dad, can I borrow the truck for a couple of hours?”
“Sure, #1 Son, no problem. What do you need it for?
footnote #2:
About thirty years earlier, I made the exact same reply to my then-wife (substitute #1 Son with Thorn-in-My-Side though) when, after having a private discussion with her mother, and now late in the evening, she asked me for $20. The verbal lashing I got from the both of them – WOW! I don’t remember exactly where I slept that night, but I vaguely recall the heady aroma of spruce boughs and damp, loamy earth.
end-footnote
“Well, Dad, I’m moving into a house with a few of my friends and my car won’t fit a bed or dresser in it.”
“Sure. You know where the keys are. Be careful backing it out of the garage.”
“No problemo, Pop! I’ll even fill up the gas tank before I bring it back.”
“Actually son, you’re going to have to put gas in it before you get to where you’re going, because it was sucking fumes when I came home from work yesterday.”
“Thanks for letting me know. As long as I don’t have to hear those !@#$% wind chimes anymore, I’d even wash your truck with my tongue!”
The rest of the conversation would add little to the story, so I’ll get right to the point. My oldest son HATES wind chimes in much the same way that fellow in “The Jerk” hates oil cans. All those years, and he never complained once – not even when we gave him the little tiny ones from the Boy Scout shop the day he had his Eagle Court of Honor. All that time I thought it was that he was overwhelmed by everything going on that day!
Eventually, he moved out, and a year or so later, #2 Son moved out. #3 Son moved into the bedroom geographically furthest from the back yard – preferring the sound of the trains a mere hundred yards away, to the “din” of the wind chimes. My wife and I enjoyed the wind chimes even more.
My wife likes to shop. We go to bookstores, antique shops and bead shops. She’ll shop anywhere except the grocery store – just absolutely HATES it. So, we’re at one of those you-must-have-money-bulging-out-of-you-pockets stores in a town about 8 miles north of us. This is the kind of store where you find a little purple velvet-lined wooden box to store a precious ring in, and the box costs more than the ring. This is the store where you find those chunks of glass illuminated from a pedestal beneath it and you see a delicate etching of a Portuguese Man-of-War in the middle of it, and you wonder how they did that. This is the kind of store that has wind chimes!
It was a couple of months before Holiday and we didn’t really have any debt other than the mortgage. After much deliberation as to where in the yard it might go and how we’d suspend it, as an early holiday gift to each other, we bought another set of wind chimes. This was actually going to be our fourth set of wind chimes. Our purchase went on my credit card, and we were instructed to drive around back to receive the crated pipes. Around back, a man guided me to a spot nowhere near the loading dock, handed me a pair of red, plastic flags and told me to wait right there. He checked the air pressure in my tires, added some to the rear left side, and about 5 minutes later, a fork lift came at me from behind, real fast, dropped a box across the top of the bed of the truck, and just as quickly, disappeared. The fellow said, “That box ain’t gonna shift none, so no need t’ tie it down, but y’all gonna have to fix them there flags to the sides so’s you don’t get arrested.” Then he walked off, but turned around just long enough to say, “OH! And have a nice day!”
It was a slow drive home, and once we got there I rigged some pulleys, strong ropes and a gadget called a ‘come-along’ together to get the box off the truck. We hid the wind chimes in a closet in the garage, and I got out the work lights and set them up in the back yard. Holiday was only 2 months away, and I needed to work on the ‘placement’ aspect of our purchase.
With the work lights set up for the desired effect, our electric bill doubled while the branches of the Live Oak tree clamored their way to the 24-hour Sun-simulator I had set up. Every day I’d go out and lop off the ‘volunteer’ branchlets and ‘loser’ branches, and finally ended up with one that was exactly where I wanted it and had enough girth that it could support the weight of the wind chimes that would be suspended beneath it.
Around Fowl-featuring-holiday, I happened to be talking to my mother on the phone, as she lives far beyond reasonable hollering-distance, and she was lamenting the fact that she had absolutely nothing planned for Holiday – the one that comes about a month after Fowl-featuring-holiday. I swear I don’t know how it happened, but before we hung up (30 seconds later; she’s apparently familiar with the Internet), she had booked a flight from her State to mine, and she was going to be staying for a WEEK. For some reason, my wife didn’t think this was a bad thing, although agreed that a week was probably stretching things a bit, especially since I was on a big project at work and wasn’t getting any time off since Holiday occurred on a weekend that year.
My mother arrived the Humpday before Holiday, on time, and my wife and I were there, on time, to greet her. My mother also happens to read a lot, so of course, we talked about what each of us was reading. Coincidentally, my mother and I happened to be reading different books about the same subject – civility – and she then went into this discourse about how horribly rude and inconsiderate car drivers were, and people cutting in line in front of her at the supermarket, etc. After that day, I didn’t see anything related to the subject matter we had both been reading.
Four looooooooonnnnnnnnnggggggggg days pass; it’s Holiday Day. #1 Son and #2 Son come for breakfast – big breakfast – lots of breakfasty type foods and gallons of coffee. They have a tight schedule. They have 7 mothers to visit – the one that gave birth to them, and the moms of 6 friends of theirs that treated them more like a mom than their own (mother). And, I’m grateful to all of them. We finally get round to opening presents. In very short order, we’re down to just one leaning against the wall. My wife and I invited the boys to open it, because we already know what it is. All 3 of them dragged it to the center of the Living Room, and proceed to go at it with hammers and crowbars and a cat’s paws and banding scissors, and #1 Son begins to feel somewhat apprehensive as they finally get the box to yield a little. My mother is quite curious at this point, edging close and closer for a look. There was a chorus of “OH NO!” from the boys as they pulled back the stuffing to reveal the pipes within. It was an unusual “oh no”, only in that it was in perfect Doric harmony, something which I could have not possibly taught them, because I am bereft of a singing voice. So I credit their mother for this phenomenon. #1 Son was now looking at me as if I was the Devil incarnate. He was positively nauseated. This was NOTHING compared to the reaction his grandmother had though.
“NO! DON’T TAKE IT OUT OF THE BOX! I DON’T BELIEVE THIS! I JUST… Yours Truly WHAT? AND YOU, Mrs. Truly! WHAT WERE YOU THINKING? TAKE IT BACK! TAKE IT BACK THIS VERY INSTANT! HOW COULD YOU, Yours Truly? ARE YOU INSANE? WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH YOU? WHERE DO YOU THINK YOU’RE GOING TO PUT THAT THING? NOWHERE, I’M TELLING YOU BECAUSE IT’S GOING BACK TO THE STORE TODAY, AND DON’T YOU THINK DIFFERENT. WHAT ARE THE – NO! GET IT OUT OF HERE RIGHT NOW. YOUR NEIGHGBORS ARE GOING TO HATE YOU AND I DON’T BLAME THEM ONE BIT! Yours Truly, THIS HAS GOT TO BE THE STUPIDEST THING YOU’VE EVER DONE. I DON’T BELIVE THIS! WHAT’S THE NAME OF THE OWNER OF THE STORE? I’M GOING TO CALL HIM RIGHT NOW AND DEMAND THAT HE TAKE IT BACK IMMEDIATELY. I DON’T CARE IF YOU EVER GET YOUR MONEY BACK. GET RID OF THIS THING, NOW! ...Or words to that effect. I mean, I don’t remember it verbatim; it was a few years ago, and the echoes aren’t nearly as strong as they were last April, even.
The thing is, she carried on like that for a good 45 minutes. I really thought she was going to pop a vein in her temple. #1 Son was quite disturbed by her behavior. He excused himself, retrieved a ladder from the shed in the back yard, dragged the wind chimes out to the back yard, tied a rubber mat around the tree limb, and with sheer brute strength (probably the adrenaline from my mother’s ongoing ranting), lifted the wind chimes up on to the hook, and then put the ladder away. He's never put anything away in his life, so I could tell he was bothered. I attached the wind catcher, and we began to unwrap the pipes. The longest was 5 feet and perhaps 3, maybe 3 and a half inches in diameter, and there were 6 pipes all together. My mother was still inside, ranting, but the rest of us were outside staring in awe and amazement at the wind chimes. My wife looked at me in a way that suggested that perhaps, her mother-in-law may have a valid point!
And then it happened. A gentle breeze wafted its way through the yard, overcame the resistance of the wind catcher, and a single note played. It’s a big wind chime; it plays low notes; the kind of notes that cause screws to back out of wood all by themselves. Four minutes later, you could still hear it. Last-month-of-the-year is not particularly windy or cold (usually) in central Formerly-largest-State- in-the-Union, so this note didn’t have much competition, save for my mother’s still-just-as-forceful ravings alone by herself in the Living Room. The rest of us just stood around in the back yard, smiling, mesmerized by that one note. But eventually another, stronger breeze came along, and soon there were several notes going all at once and the reverberation was so appealing that we didn’t care that all of our body cells were realigning themselves to the harmonic ambiance.
Eventually, even my mother felt and heard it, inside the house, and she stopped ranting to listen. She finally opened the back door, and just stood there for a while. Then she came and joined us as we stood there and grinned at each other, not particularly caring about deadlines or schedules or empty coffee mugs. My mother leaned over to me and whispered in my ear, “They sound beautiful, but your neighbors are going to ~HATE~ you forever,” and then she jabbed me in the ribs with one of those long bony fingers of hers and went back inside the house.
Three looooooooonnnnnnnnnggggggggg days later, it was Humpday morning, and my mother had to catch her plane home. I secretly wondered why she hadn’t just saved the airfare, and commuted by broom. There were other, not as outrageous, but even more upsetting episodes during those days, but they’re stories for another time, maybe. Stephen King has been bugging me for them.
As I said before, Last-month-of-the-year is not particularly windy or cold (usually) in central Formerly-largest-State-in-the-Union, so I felt it was worth repeating here, because what it ~IS~ particular with is: fog. Go figure! Pea soup has less viscosity. We left early. The airport my mother had arrived at closed (forever) while she was visiting, and the new airport was in business for only about 4 days. It was further away, and I had never been there before. We traveled at, for the conditions, a dangerous 15 mph all the way to the new airport. It was a long drive, but not so much that I would exaggerate the word ‘long’. For some reason, my wife wasn’t ready in time to see my mother off, so she had to stay behind on this trip.
We talked about fog. We talked about previous occasions of having either driven in fog, or a third-hand story of someone else’s experience of having driven in fog. If the talk varied even one iota from the topic, the variance was interrupted and returned to: fog.
I left my mother and her bag at the curb in front of the terminal, and drove off. And that is why my mother is never coming to visit us again – because I didn’t kiss her goodbye.
Edited to fix the extended "long"s. Apparently, there's a 40 character limit on a single word.
4WholeHouseLibrary
#2 - We have 4 of those 'tuned' wind chimes in the back yard, and 3 others - bamboo, sea shells and little brass ones - on our balcony.
5NightHawk777
I like chimes. Currently, I only have 4 ceramic type bells I aquired in Arizona.
6cal8769
*ROFL*
That is a great story. I can sooooo relate. Why, you might ask? Because my neighbors are a miniature version of you!! They have chimes hanging from their back porch. It's about 40 ft. or so from my bedroom door, which on nice breezy nights I love to have open all night long while I am sleeping. The chimes are beautiful......except during a storm. They smash and clang and are so obnoxious it is unbelievable. I have been tempted to sneak over and tie a string around them during the night.
That is a great story. I can sooooo relate. Why, you might ask? Because my neighbors are a miniature version of you!! They have chimes hanging from their back porch. It's about 40 ft. or so from my bedroom door, which on nice breezy nights I love to have open all night long while I am sleeping. The chimes are beautiful......except during a storm. They smash and clang and are so obnoxious it is unbelievable. I have been tempted to sneak over and tie a string around them during the night.
7MrsLee
Thanks for the story! :) I used to love windchimes, until I watched Signs. Now they give me the creeps.
8pollysmith
A wonderful story that will have me grinning all day!
A pleasant country drive from us is a store that specializes in Windchimes, appropriately enough called "The Windchime Shop" It carries every kind of windchime in every size and every material you can think of. Hubby loves to embarress me by tapping the biggest pipe of the biggest set hard enough to set the whole thing off so I totally get your story!
A pleasant country drive from us is a store that specializes in Windchimes, appropriately enough called "The Windchime Shop" It carries every kind of windchime in every size and every material you can think of. Hubby loves to embarress me by tapping the biggest pipe of the biggest set hard enough to set the whole thing off so I totally get your story!
10SomeGuyInVirginia
Bwahahaha! Dude, that will make a great pub. Great subtle bits, I especially like the understated, 'deep-meaning' bit about your mom not coming to visit you again because you didn't kiss her goodbye. It sounds like you done good with the kids, too.
