Everyone back to school and family care and work today. Summer vacation is over. Maxim was playing with Gwen in the sandbox when we picked her up. Noah was happy to see us. I got Marcela at the train first. When we got home Marcela gathered more seeds from her flowers and divided them into piles while she talked to Hugo from Argentina. Maxim played naked in the back yard and I re-attached the back bumper to the frame of the car. The sun is at longer angles near the end of the day on its slow migration toward the southern horizon. It feels like fall, late August, the season of harvest, when you can reap the fruits of your patience. The plastic car had sat in the same place all week in the yard, so I put it out in the side street. Noah played and played. Maxim brought out her bicycle and rode up and down. Later she played in the pool, but he got too cold. The kids seem to have a different energy about them today. We all do. We finished more scraping of the windows. We hoped to finish both of the front windows, but it proved to be too much. I have the hardest part of the second one waiting for me tormorrow. I'm afraid that the sill on the first window (the left one) is rotted through, but I am going to let the dry wind dessicate it before I decide what to do. These are the original boards from 1880 or 1890 when the house was built. I could see today that the clapboards underneath had been a kind of peach color once. The frames were once dark green. Each layer of paint, another personal history. We are trying to restore the underlying character of the house, a sturdy, working-class home.