We spent a good long time in Home Depot yesterday trying to find the right plastic connectors to fix the broken pipe under the red cabin.

There is not a working faucet on the outside of that house where we could hook up a garden hose and use it on the outside of the house. In order to do this, we have to start up the pump in the river near our house, then open and shut valves to direct the water over there. This is a big process because it takes about 15 minutes to prime the pump and lots of scurrying about.

How this was handled before I moved here is one of the items on my list of questions I have for my dad who died in an airplane accident in 2002. I have to keep the list in mind just in case I would ever get a chance to ask him these questions in a dream or whatever. I figure if I don't have a list, I'll get flustered and forget to ask the most important questions.

Another question is how come whenever my folks talked about a certain piece of pottery they bought in the 1960s they gave each other a look and a smile. I could never figure out if they thought they paid too much for it, or too little, or maybe there was some other story about how they acquired it.

They may not sound like the most important questions in the world, but it's the little things that bother us most.