Tonight,
I drove to Kelso to visit with friends … and met a new friend 😊
But
before actually getting to Kelso, I stopped at the Indy Diner for Supper. I’ve
been very tired lately, so I decided to enrich my blood with a Liver &
Onions supper – I like liver, and it’s a good source of iron.
I
smiled when I saw my waitress: she had always waited on us, and her makeup was
always so thick, it looked like she was wearing a halloween mask (and Bob
said she looked like a girl in Bob’s high school class dubbed ‘scare’em’);
that sounds cruel, I know, but seriously her makeup was so thick it seemed put
on with a plastering spatula. But tonight, the makeup was not so thick … and
I sent a mental message to Bob, of that fact, with a silent chuckle 😉
Tonight,
while visiting friends in Kelso, and talking with Sue (a widow, like me),
I broke off midsentence and said, “here, I’ll show you his picture – and you
will understand why my heart could never belong to anyone else.” And she
did: she took a look, and said, “Oh my. He was one good-looking man!”
And I smiled. He was. And for our brief 44 years together, he was
all mine. Being able to freely talk about him, gives me joy.
I
spent a very good and friendly two hours in Kelso before heading home. As I
turned down the backroad, intending to take the looping route back home, I saw
that the road I wanted had been closed for a portion of it and a detour was in
place.
When
I got home, I received a phone call asking if I wanted to be part of a Fall Bazaar
at Rosburg Hall the end of October – I said “Yes!”, and noted the details on
the wall calendar. Then I immediately started taking mental inventory of what I
had on hand … and what I’d have to quickly make up for new inventory 😉
And,
I headed for the kitchen to sort through the various thermoses: coffee
thermoses, and soup thermoses. Vendors sit through many hours between
foot traffic, at Bazaars; coffee and soup are good satisfiers 😊
Opening
the cupboard and sorting through the contents to find what I will be needing, I
see that I haven’t completely culled all of my husband’s things; in the
bedroom – atop his drawered valet, I’ve left his favorite pencil stubs where he
left them the last time that he used them when designing things for me (like
the birdhouse and bird feeder that hangs outside the livingroom window; and the
garden boxes I replant every Spring); on the top shelf in the bedroom
closet – and in the Highlander armrest-cubby, I’ve kept a couple of his favorite
hats that weren’t frayed with continual use and laundering; in “his top drawer”
of the bedroom dresser, I’ve hoarded scraps of paper with his scratchy handwriting
on them (though these are fading to near indiscernible, as he preferred
pencil over ballpoint ink); I’ve kept his thermal tops, and I will wear them every Winter until they literally all apart; photos bring me to him:
looking at his snapshot face and form, memories vibrate with the sound of his
voice, his laughter, the feel of him next to me, his zest for life – the recorded
CD testimonial, and phone videos echo with his ability to find wonder and joy in
every situation, and to easily laugh even in the midst of pain and hardship: these
things relay to me, his enduring strength … on which my strength in the moment,
at any given moment, pulls strongly on … and now these forlorn
hospital mugs are staring me in the face as I take inventory of forgotten thermoses
that will be put to use this Fall/Winter. Why did I hang into those
plastic mugs – do I actually intend to use them, at some point? I stare at
those things, and wonder at the strange eccentricity of my sentimentality.
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