So it's 6:30 a.m. in the morning and the sun is up. It wouldn't have been up last week but daylight savings time has come again. The day is unusually warm for November and I'm doing what I have been doing at 6:30 a.m. for the past few days. With my trusty sidekick, Day, by my side, I am raking leaves while waiting for the school bus. It's as pleasant as such chores get but with each flick of the rake I think the same thing, over and over.

No, I don't think how wonderful it is to have a daughter who is so helpful, although I should be thinking that. No, I don't think how much my nose runs from allergies as I do the chore. (I just bring out tissues and try to pretend the problem does not exist.) No, I don't think that raking early in the morning will soon turn to shoveling snow early in the morning, although I'm sure that truth hits me somewhere below the conscious level. And no, I don't think "I think I can," "I think I can," because I wish I didn't have to is a lot closer to the truth.

What I think is "I want a condo." Increasingly, I am becoming aware that there someday soon will be life after children. As I watch Day rake with me and remember that Kat helped, albeit sometimes reluctantly, with shoveling, I don't necessarily think the absence of children will be good. I know that the absence of helpful children will be a pain. But life without children will present some opportunities and I don't want to be raking my mornings away when they come.

Over the years, when the lottery prize gets quite high, FogieKnight has bought a lottery ticket. As I have explained to the girls, he gets the fun of dreaming all week for a dollar. I don't tend to get lottery tickets because most of my dreams are not linked to money. I want a condo and it's not a question of money. It's a question of being married to a man who needs his little piece of ground. The real question is what he needs it for?

I will admit that I am not the one who mows the lawn. I have only very rarely mowed. The mowing tends to make me wheeze and sneeze and I just don't do it. But all the rest of the yard work is within my work circle. It's not that FogieKnight does not help. He does. It's just that the bushes, the leaves, and the snow often seem to be my job---and I dislike those chores.

And so, a condo represents freedom to me. Someone else would rake, someone else would trim bushes, and someone else would shovel snow�and I could still have something that I own.

And so, perhaps I need to convince Marn to come and stay�even if I would have to promise to buy all the hostas she can find room to plant.

Or maybe I should start dreaming of winning the lottery and hire a gardener.

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