I know I will be posting only intermittently this week. Today I'm on the road for work, and then the rest of the week will be a downward slide toward departure . . . with the unpleasant but distinct possibility that I will also have to schedule in a 12-hour roundtrip to bring my son home from college. Of course we'll be glad to have his young man muscles home for the move, but the end-of-the-semester timing is not good.

In addition, we're still dealing with water problems, though a solution does seem at hand. One excellent side-effect of yesterday's Take Our Stuff party was a chance to talk with all of our jerry-rigging friends about how they solved their own water problems. When half of your closest friends in town don't even have wells but use complicated self-invented spring-water piping systems, there's sure to be plenty of useful talk about bacteria.

Another lovely moment yesterday involved clothespins. Now that we have to put so much of our stuff in storage, I have gritted my teeth and forced myself to shed some of my daily, much-loved yard items. In that spirit, I set my basket of clothespins out on the Take Our Stuff bench. But simultaneously, two of my friends converged on me and said in horrified tones, "Dawn! You're not giving away your clothespins? You can't do that. You need to put those into storage! Good clothespins are irreplaceable!" . . . at which point I fell into tears and clutched the basket to my chest. They were right. Some things are too important to lose.

It has been such a gift to live among people who understand the emotional power of clothespins.