For me, it’s 120 miles from door to door. I can usually get there in two hours over five highways and get back in two and a half hours, unless it’s Sunday morning and everyone (light traffic) is going 75 mph. Even with the planned detour for road construction, I still made it in two hours and ten minutes.
I left two days ago, under-packed, forgetting extra pairs of blue jeans and bras. When I got home today, I started a load of darks. I took off my jeans that I’d worn for 4 days, and they walked themselves to the washer, jumped in, and screamed, “Close the lid!”
Then I had my missed mug of mid-morning fake coffee with a Madeleine cookie. It was lightly raining as I emptied the car of all the stuff I haul back and forth to my little beach house. The dogs were happy to be back home and stretched themselves on the couch. No walks today, at least not until it stops raining.
It’s been raining since December, almost weekly. We’ve had eleven atmospheric rivers, which one meteorologist called a fire hose pointed right at the Bay Area. The last storm (last weekend) was more wind than rain, and boy, did it do damage to Monterey County: flooding (a broken levee that put Pajaro and part of Watsonville (SC County) under water), downed trees everywhere, some leaning so far over that the town would be prudent to take them out. The huge Eucalyptus by the post office is pulling up the cement, and I think it’s ready to go. Hopefully it will be before or after postal hours. Otherwise, a dozen people could be in the way when it falls.
As I shopped around town at the thrift stores, I kept hearing how everyone lost power over and over as it went out, came back on, only to go out the next day, etc, etc.
At one store, I found a huge sign that says Fiction in big read letters. It had to be either from a library or a book store. I bought it because I’m a writer and because I like weird stuff. It was cheap. By the time the male clerk gave me a wisdom discount (old lady) and a 10% coupon discount, he was practically paying me to take the stuff out the door. I had three things, and the total was $11.00.
I spent the first two hours at my house picking up hundreds of tiny branches, pine cones, moss and some big limbs that the wind had taken down. I filled up my 92-gallon green can and asked the neighbor to borrow her second can. It’s hard to get away from her. We share a driveway, and her husband passed away before Christmas. She’s lonely, so I talk to her as much as I can. I missed a thrift store closing at 3:00 on the second day, because I talked to her too long. No big-ee. She needed me to listen.
I bought a few groceries, set the bag down, returned to the car for one more thing, came back to unlock the door, and discovered my Twix bar wrapper in the weeds.
Oh, Daisy, why must you be such a strange and needy girl?
Pepper was sniffing around the bag, forlorn that Daisy got to it first.
FIRST DATE, WORST DATE EVER! 