Quiet Times With Friends

     We are enjoying a few days with only occasional commitments.  Durelle has pretty well caught up with the laundry and ironing prior to going to Maine where we'll get by with bi-weekly pump outs by the "honey wagon" instead of a sewer connection.

     My father's last house was built by his son-in-law, Eldy Taylor, in 1975.  At that time I scrounged from the construction site a 2 1/2 foot cut off end of a 2x12.  With a handheld router I engraved his name in the piece and hung it over the garage door.  After he died in 1983, and there was no longer a Cloutier living there, I gave the sign to our son, Mark where it has remained to this this day.  As you may surmise from the additional sign in front of it, it now resides on his large back porch where it has been for twenty years.  The raw piece of lumber has weathered nicely for forty years and counting.  It's a small symbol of the continuity of family.
     Last night we took Mark and Heather to downtown Nashua for an early 30th anniversary supper.  Nashua has not outgrown its small town roots even though it is now a city.

     This the unchanging Main Street.  We lived there from '77 to '84 and from '89 to '04.  Both kids graduated from Nashua High School.  As befitting a small town, we exited the restaurant to find, at the outside seating, a couple of Durelle's golfing buddies from 25 years ago.  
     The Jeep's bumper gets repaired today.  We've got a few days in the nineties, then we head for Maine on Monday.