Slightly Rejuvenated

Yesterday was a short but refreshing break from my midwinter tedium.  I had my solitary motel (not just the room, no one else not even the owner, was there).  I picked up a friend for coffee and a bit of yarn shopping.  Then I dropped her off and went over to The Clearing's main campus for a walk and then a little snowshoeing in the quiet.  I was the only person there.  Do you understand what that's like?  All I heard was the crunch of my feet on the snow and the wind sighing high up in the trees.  I wasn't on anyone's timetable, no one was expecting me to show up or say why not, I just was.  For hours on end.  It was beyond lovely.  The only problem is... I want to do it again.  Soon.  (I'm such a greedy-gut.)

Today is Family Supper, aka JZ's second cooking lesson, and we're off the hook for cooking anything.  I'm taking my bin of Chinese New Year dishes, etc. over later this morning to see if DIL1 wants to use any of it and I've offered to bring fortune cookies, but that's the extent of our assignments.  Durwood's got a list of errands he wants to get done today and I'll be his chauffeur since this is a bad winter for him breathing outside; I'll drop him at the store door so he can walk around every bleeding aisle in the store.  My preferred way of shopping is to zoom in, get what I need, and zoom out.  He likes to shop.  He's got his list and he pretty much sticks to it, but he shops around, checking things out, and also stretching his legs a bit.  It's a good idea but I lose patience. *sigh*  Yet another thing I need to work on.

March 2 (March?!?  are you kidding me?  it's March?  how?)--Walker Evans, License Photo Studio, New York, 1934.  Learn to drive $10 the sign said but who had ten bucks?  Who had a job?  The license photo guy did but nobody else seemed to.  Lines were long outside soup kitchens.  Bread lines they called them.  They'd give you a ladle of soup, thin and runny soup, and a slab of rough bread.  Real bread, not that doughy white stuff that I imagine rich folks eat.  If you were one of the first twenty or so in the soup line you got more than broth, you got meat and vegetables or beans.  There were a lot of days I'd have killed for a bowl of bean soup with a bit off ham off the hock floating in it.  Nobody had ten bucks to learn to drive.  Nobody had a nickel for a license photo.  I didn't know anybody with a car anyway.  I'll bet that license photo guy was in the bread line too.

Well.  Isn't that cheerful?  But that's what came last night when I was tucked in my own bed with my own husband over on the other side under his electric blanket turned to 6 or 7.  Too HOT!!  Happy Saturday.
--Barbara