My children will....

As my Mother in Law  aged, I began to go through her refrigerator and pantry checking for past the use by date foods.  Her eyesight was very bad by this time and I asked her permission first.  She thought it was a good idea and was very embarrassed at the number of things she had that were no longer safe to eat.  Each time we visited I did this.  I also found some things that amused me...she had, for example, 3 boxes for string....labeled "long:, "medium" and "too short to save."  She also had a collection of Hunt's tomato sauce cans, empty, clean and stacked and a big box of vinyl gloves, with  the index finger cut off of almost half of them.  I never figured this out, but I found it interesting and laughed about it with my husband.  My Mom lived by herself until she was 100 years old.  I routinely went through her fridge and pantry weeding out things.   She tended to save left overs ( or meals I had taken her)  a long time.  Some were almost unrecognizeable.  Her main quirk was to put something away so that no one would steal it (I don''t know who she thought would do that) and then not be able to find it, thus convincing herself that someone had indeed stolen it.  I have spent hours looking for whatever it was with her, only to find it in some strange place (like a coat pocket) and then she would say..."Oh, yes, I remember putting that there now."

Now as I am getting older, I have started planning what my children will laugh about.  This morning I decided that probably one thing was our "obsession" with birds.  We are birders.  My husband keeps meticulous records of the birds we see each day.  We also feel birds.  We have special feeders for Goldfinches. Hummingbirds, Bullock's Orioles, Titmice and bird seed feeders for the usual sparrows, doves, Cardinals, Pyrrhuloxia  etc.  In the winter we put out a peanut butter feeder and the birds feast on it.  Usually we take it down in late March or early April when the Orioles come.  However this year the Male and female Ladder-Backed Woodpeckers and the Golden-Fronted Woodpecker have been coming  regularly several times a day.  So we just left it up.  And yes, we do have names for some of our birds....they are our "pets."   We also have "our" flock of Wild Turkeys....As I reread this, they might be right......