Quiet Summer Days

I remember Uncle Paul telling me once that they always began to thresh wheat on June 20, my dad’s birthday. Of course, in that day the wheat had been cut and shocked separately, and he was talking about threshing with a steam engine. Still, that crossed my mind today when I came home and saw the Pinsons threshing the wheat on Mom’s farm with their combine. By the way, Dad would be a centenarian if he were alive today.

Speaking of anniversaries, if Dad were alive today, he and Mom would celebrate their 59th anniversary tomorrow. Vicki and I celebrated our 23rd anniversary on Sunday.

It’s been rather quiet around the Swann house over the last three weeks. We’ve enjoyed having Jenna home, though she’s been very busy with her two part-time jobs, the psychology course she is taking online, and helping organize and prepare for the mission trip to Haiti next month.

The boys have been busy with their summer training for cross country. So far they are up to running four miles a day and that will continue to increase over the following weeks. Ben has also had summer conditioning for basketball and two basketball camps over the last few weeks, but that’s done until basketball practice resumes in the fall.

I don’t think I mentioned this last time, but the transmission went out in Jenna’s car a few weeks ago. Since it was going to cost more to fix the car than the car itself was worth, we decided to put it up for sale on Facebook Marketplace. We were up front about the condition of the car and we still had it sold within a few hours of posting it. We found a deal on an Impala for her that some friends of ours have for sale. We just haven’t been able to complete the sale yet because that car has a new instrument panel and is waiting for the odometer to be reset to show the correct mileage.

We usually borrow Mom’s car for emergencies like this, but the transmission is out on that one too. It has been interesting to try to get five people all the different directions we need to go with only three vehicles. And to beat all, the water pump went out on Ben’s Jeep yesterday. That, at least, got fixed before the day was out.

I’m still going in to work as I am a twelve month employee at school, though my schedule is lighter. I’ve also been able to get a lot of little jobs done around the house that have literally been waiting on me to get to them for a few years. It feels good to get those things off my to do list and I hope I knock out a few more before school resumes in August.

Joe