Well, I’m home after five days of music, friendship, and fun in Marathon, Texas. It was all good. Even the long drives were pleasant. Last night I unpacked and upaused the home restoration that started when I emptied my late wife’s closet, which in turn led me to cleaning out the old guest rooms for my son and replacing my king bed with a queen and taking down pictures and moving chest of drawers. You might say I am literally and figuratively, picking up the pieces.

The big news is I believe I’ll be able to repair a drawer in a big, fancy chest of drawers we have. Its part of a bedroom suite that was reunited when the queen bed came back. I have no idea why, when the drawer first went wonky, I didn’t look at the back of the chest to see if I could access the interior. Depression? Probably. I think it’s fair to say I was off my game during the last years of my wife’s long demise.

Anyway, the back is screwed on, which is a good sign, so today I’ll take off the backing to see what sort of magic I might be able to work on the broken slide that makes one of the drawers go all catawampus when I pull it in and out. And wouldn’t that be magical if I just had backing that could be removed so they could tinker with the interior. Although, that might mean I was an android and I’m not sure I want to go there. Yet. We’ll see how this aging thing goes. At some point, I might be up for having parts replaced.

John W. Wilson is the author of The Long Goodbye: A Caregiver’s Tale