Midweek, almost. It is thunderstorm season - trees and grass very green, dinner on the deck , which only wants sanding and staining, most nights now, unless of course, storm comes at dinnertime. Tonight during dinner a pair of neighbors Chris recently made friends with walked by with their pet duck (yes you read that right) in a bright green wheel barrow. Of course that caused a good interruption replete with conversation laughter and much quacking on the part of duck - not as much quacking from Liam as I would have expected. On the "small world" side of things, the woman in this couple was the administrator who helped Ruth through logistics a few years back when she started teaching at the community college. She, though closer to my age, grew up on this street and, like Ruth, moved back from the suburbs to her childhood home. Her parents died before she came back, however.

It is a Jewish holiday, Succoth, on which we celebrate having received the Ten Commandments and, oddly, have a tradition of eating rich dairy dessert. Chris served cheesecake, yum. We talked about the Ten Commandments after supper on the deck, named them and discussed which seem the most difficult to follow. We settled on idolatry (not in the literal sense but in the sense of worshiping (overvaluing) things of the world rather than the divine and not bearing false witness in the sense of avoiding giving an intentionally false or partial impression . I like it that our Jewish spiritual practices seem to be casually woven into our lives together these days - not nearly as thick a thread as in an Orthodox home, but present and treasured and just part of life. This feels good to me now and makes me happy that Liam has never known it otherwise.