Fun Friday

Mike has left Hartwell and is heading toward Texas!

I spent the morning shopping, instead of going to yoga as planned.  My friend who owns a consignment store is back with her original husband, living next door, actually.  "I've been alone for over twenty years," she said, "And I want to keep my own space and do whatever I feel like when I get home from work."  She seems very happy.  "We are not the same people we were," she said.  "Now we are great companions."

A few years ago, she bought a little weekend house in her hometown to serve as a weekend retreat.  "I think we all wind up going back to where we started," she said.  "Either to live or be buried."

But it's not the same town it was--what with all the fracking and oil-business traffic.  "Everyone I knew is moving away," she said.  So she sold her weekend house and built a little cabin at Medina Lake, right next door to her original husband.  "I told him when he left me for another woman 23 year ago that he'd be back," she said.  "I was right."

At Boysville Thrift Shop, I found two big down-filled European style pillows, covered in linen, brand new.  I like Boysville--and what their money goes toward, so whenever I have bags of donations or am looking for something myself, I go there first.

A little girl about Elena's age was trying on her clothes in the dressing room.  Her mother, aunt, and grandmother were all standing outside waiting, speaking to her in Spanish, everybody smiling.  

When the little girl came out of the dressing room, she modeled her new-used outfit (a pink T-shirt that said Love, and a denim skirt)  and said, "Ta-Da!" with as much enthusiasm as if it had been a designer outfit.  I loved that!

My sweet mama (Carlene) also bought me a beautiful cheery sleigh bed I'd been looking at over at Carmen's Antiques on Hildebrand.  I sent her a picture on the phone, just to see what she thought of it, and she decided right then and there that it should be my Thursday present.  This will be the first time I'll have had a bed with a headboard AND a footboard.  Some little kid will one day find my bright red headboard at Boysville and be as happy about it as I am my new grown-up real bed!

Whatever day of the week it is, if Carlene buys a present, and it's not a birthday, she calls it a "Thursday present."

The only hitch in this otherwise perfect day is a flare up of my self-diagnosed "fibromyalgia" --aching all over like I have the flu.  It's probably the "minor scleroderma"--an inflammatory condition that seems to go underground and then pops up again, depending on what I've been eating.  The young man at the Juice Bar suggested a ginger shot; unpleasant as it tastes--it has helped in the past and maybe it will again.  Ginger and tumeric--he says--are the best things for aches and pains.

In the meanwhile--104 degrees outside--I'm going to take some Ibuprofen and settle in for an afternoon of In-Bed reading, starting with some in  the big stack of books I brought home from Gerlinde's.  

First, a re-reading of  The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, then A Thousand Country Roads--epilogue to Bridges of Madison County.