The Nearly Perfect Husband and I were home in chic and trendy Dunstable last week for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that we met with a very nice young couple who wanted to take a look at the Disposable Shack*.

I know!

Our plan was to put the house on the market this spring and be totally chill during the selling process (meaning: me mostly in Maine ignoring the entire process (a deal I made with JoHn long ago… we’ll see how well this works)).

But then Jack got all romantic and proposed to Mac.

Eye-roll.

So now we have a wedding in July and I cannot see me trying to sell a house and throw a wedding here at The Inn**, so we decided that we would put the Disposable Shack on the market in, like, August. Or maybe September.

And now JoHn, at this point in reading this, has a hive… because he wants to sell it yesterday.

Or last year.

But, oh-well-he-smells, we cannot.

And, you know what, it’s really six of one, half a dozen of the other (or, as Sam would say, Po-tay-to/Tom-ah-to) because he either has to deal with still having the house, or with me morphing into the Tasmanian Devil and tearing all whirl-wind-y through his psyche due to stress (and maybe a bit due to the end of mental-pause).

Tough choice.

So, anyway, this very nice young couple…

Their query came the way all small town queries do. You sneeze or mumble something into the wind, and then you get a ‘we heard from <insert neighbor, postal employee, contractor, or dog of friend here> that you might be thinking of putting your house on the market…”

And we said that we were, like in the fall maybe, and a conversation ensued and pretty soon we were filling trash bags and boxes with stuff for Goodwill and the dump and Savers and the library.

We also put a few things aside for family members who I hope will appreciate the set-asides rather than smile and nod politely… the way we did with the Old Yankee Man when he decided that JoHn and I – with absolutely zero evidence – collected shot glasses, and embarked on a decades-long international (yep, Germany included) obsessive quest for shot glasses. For two people who didn’t drink very much and rarely, if ever, did… shots!

They became little Sam’s favorite juice glasses. He would actually slam them down on the table and yell ‘hit me!’.

Anyway…

After five days of much-needed cleaning out the big areas, we were done and then we swiffered and… And then we realized that we did all that big stuff but neglected to spend our time on things like taking down the Christmas tree and putting the Christmas stuff away.

In our defense, we had Christmas and went to Maine! (Say that in a very wHine-y voice and you will approach my own tone).

And, also, I have approximately 20 very large Rubbermaid containers, each of which I was assured would hold 40 gallons of Christmas stuff (which would be a lot of liquified Christmas stuff, I tell you!)

But it’s also a lot of Christmas stuff in solid form, and that only includes the stuff that fits in the containers.

The 45 lb, 4 foot tall freaky Santa with wine bottles on his coat, and several other assorted items, are extra.

So it takes a very long time to clean up from Christmas and, thus-ly, we did take the Christmas tree down – the dried needle path through the house and yard were impressive to say the least. Then we took a deep breath, turned on the lights inside and outside, and just owned it as the people toured our house. They seemed perfectly fine with that and we will see what happens.

So last night I climbed into Gronk – my fun-yet-capable steed of a truck – and headed back up to Maine with a cargo bay full of stuff, and John and the Shepherds are following later today.

When I got here, after my three-hour ride, it was late.

My headlights were my guide, and I pulled to a stop in front of the barn. As soon as I opened the door, the cold whispered its way inside. I reached for my phone and camera, stepped down from the truck, and smelled it.

Snow.

There wasn’t any on the ground. None falling from the sky… but it was coming.

Winter magic.

And this morning my eyes woke, urging me to gaze straight ahead… out the window and over the cove.

There it was.

I know, right?

What a gift it is to be pulled of bed by a smile… to run outside after it, underdressed because there is no time. You want to be in it… need to be in it.

In this place.

This world.

I know. It’s a small thing.

But… it’s a big small thing.

A big small thing.

Sometimes paying attention to these big small things make all the difference.

As always, come on over to Just Ponderin’s Facebook page to comment <3

*The Disposable Shack is the name we gave to our house in Dunstable when we knew we were eventually going to sell it. It’s funny and ironic, if only because the house is slightly larger than a shack :))

**The Inn is the house in Maine… but it’s not really an inn. It was, in the early 1900s, but it is not now… so, no. You cannot sleep here. That’s just freaky.