The trailer across the road is impressively maintained. The four vehicles that sleep and leave there are quartered tidily at night, the lawn is mowed every few days, the outdoor swinging benches are appropriately parallel or perpendicular to the house, the trampoline and inflated pool are pristine.

They had a party there, last night, with a little pavilion tent set up and a strange trumpet-like party favor that filtered into our own conversations with friends over homemade pizza, garden tea, cucumber salad, cole slaw, zucchini brownies and ice cream, and chocolate mousse.

I made the slaw and pizza, the latter of which I was quite proud: two (with slightly burned bottoms) pepperoni pizzas with lots of sauce, cheese, and pepperoni; one a deep-dish cheese with squash-cubes-simmered-in-chicken-broth; and one a white pizza layered with sauteed onion and garlic, basil, mozzarella, Parmesan, and ground pepper.

Before supper we took our visiting friends on a tour of our country life, milling about the garden talking corn and broccoli, admiring my newly organized trash heaps, noting the pre-gobbled blueberries, brainstorming about the cash crops we could grow in our front acre.

My latest grandiose idea is to dig out a patio in the slope that is our back yard, but we currently have many other priorities. As I am able to work on the ones that require no money, I’ve finished moving the fence, finally, and restacked the naily lumber pulled from the downstairs wall in that hectic week before we moved in, and washed the windows, and this week I’ll maybe wash the baseboard heaters.

They’re why I can do only free projects, those heaters. We bought a brand new oil-fired boiler for them. It’s a contraption that will keep us quite toasty, provided we use it, since we’re highly inclined to spend the money from selling the truck on firewood logs that I can saw and split right in our back yard and burn in our living room stove.

The boiler–our insurance company required some sort of heat as a backup to the wood stove–was a bugger to put in, from what the installers said.

“I’d like to shoot the man who ran these pipes,” said the grizzled man, not the one–this week, anyway–who smoked in our basement. “That newer bathroom? The pipes runs behind the tub. If they bust-es, that whole tub’ll have to be torn out.”

One of my free projects is that I’ve been in charge of N and food the past few weeks, too, since M is teaching mornings and planning afternoons. (As I tell people, she’s getting more of a summer vacation than I am.) N helps me with outside jobs, requires me to stop for snacks, pulls book after book off the shelf for me to begin reading to her, and begs for rides in the wagon which is no longer functional because I broke yet another wheel by loading up too many fence posts.

All this work has cultivated in me a stellar appetite, if I didn’t have one before. On Thursday I got the urge to make a rhubarb crisp, so M cut some stalks while I decided that the single recipe of crumbs looked piddly, doubled the 9×13″ recipe and laid the crumbs twice as thick.

I’m glad our visiting friend last night informed us that a nutritionist friend of hers claims that butter is a good fat, because we ate the whole crisp–including the crumbs’ two sticks of the divine paste–in two sittings. Practically speaking, anyway. M didn’t want seconds in that second sitting, so I saved a small bit for her to finish yesterday.

“You shouldn’t tell everyone that,” M said after I told our friends about the crisp. “It’s so embarrassing.”

Embarrassingly delicious, at least.

Embarrassed or not, we still had fun with our friends. With them we coined the phrase “chafing at the theological bit” to describe how we sometimes feel in church. I felt a bit of that sort of exasperation this morning as the pastor noted that the denominational delegates at national conference last week resolved to uphold the church’s current human sexuality statements, yet continue in dialogue with people who also want blessings for same-sex couples. What better way to say nothing?

In my college newspaper editorials I sometimes wrote against the university’s controversial building plan, but as I lost my innocence–realized that what I thought really didn’t matter–I instead turned to more personal thoughts of irrelevance, like how I never kept my hands in my pockets when I climbed or descended stairs, in case I tripped. But somehow one of the friends who visited last night, someone I really didn’t know well at college, still remembers my speaking out against the new building ideas.

I asked the only guest among us who attended a different college what he thinks he’s remembered for. “Boxy,” was his quick reply, and described his cardboard box and duct tape “backpack” that he used all four years.

We asked his wife if she would have been seen with him.

“Not in college,” she said.