Explaining OCD

The other night I was feeling a need to vacuum. All the yard sale prep plus being a visitor in someone else’s house where I don’t yet know how everything is done or where things are kept…it was all getting to me. I needed to dust or clean or organize something. Sylvain has told me more than once that when he tells his mom I am planning to sit down with her and go over the list of household chores that currently rest with her and divvy them up with her, her eyes get big. She is right into the idea, he says. And so I dared ask, while she had dinner prep under control but with serving time still a good 20 minutes away, “would you like for me to vacuum the living room?”

She said very nicely that she really preferred I not do it then. She wanted me to wait till morning.

Damn.

With no way to soothe myself, I ended up cracking up a bit when Sylvain asked later if I was okay. We were in his room whispering. “I really needed to vacuum,” I said, starting to cry as if someone had taken a lifeline away.

Later his mum pulled him aside and related her own version of what had happened. “She worked very hard all day. I’m sure she was tired, so I told her it could wait till tomorrow.”

Sylvain was very gentle in explaining that it’s okay to let me do a chore if I offer. It means I probably really want to. What a patient guy Sylvain is, living (soon) with TWO overly sensitive women! Neither of us wants to step on the other’s toes. Both of us cry easily. Oh, boy.

The garage sale went very well. I got to tend the cash box, and I brought my laptop out to the garage so I could catch up on all my blog reading in between customers. Ah. It was a gorgeous day, too.

Tonight after dinner while Sylvain’s sister was clearing the table and loading the dishwasher, I whispered to Sylvain, “where does the broom live?” Soon I was happily sweeping all the hardwood and tile floors in the house. When I was done, I went to Sylvain and gave him a big hug.

“I feel better now,” I said with a deep sigh.

While M and I went out to rent a movie, P got a chance to ask her son a few questions about me. Had I swept upstairs too? Yes, I had. P was embarrassed.

“Did you explain to your mum that I don’t clean things because they’re dirty? I clean them to soothe myself?” I asked Sylvain as he related their conversation to me later.

He had. He had done a great job of explaining Obsessive Compulsive Disorder in layman’s terms.

He explained that if I tidy a room or vacuum a rug, it isn’t a reflection of her housekeeping. You see, even if a team of cleaners had just gone over the whole house from top to bottom and super deep cleaned every inch, if I were feeling anxious about something in my life, I would look for something to clean or organize. And if it was already organized, I would organize it all over again a different way.

This is me off meds. This is me and my serotonin-wonky brain off drugs.

Yes, I am attempting these days to learn to cope with a bit of a mood disorder and anxiety without resorting to taking an SSRI. That is not to say I might not someday regret having ramped myself off Effexor this past winter. It’s not to say I might not one day change my mind and give them another try…assuming they would still work for me in spite of the hiatus. It’s just to say that right now I want to explore other ways of dealing with the neurotransmitter imbalance in my brain.

Now, has anyone seen the vacuum cleaner?

photo: Martin Abegglen

Staying Sane

I’m in Windsor for the long weekend, made longer by the 3 days I took off work. Sylvain took 2.5 days off and we started the holiday off with a bang. Many bangs. Sylvain really wanted me to see the annual fireworks show that is put on every year on the Detroit River for Canada Day and the Fourth of July for the crowds on both the American and Canadian sides of the river. They shoot off the fireworks from three barges anchored in the middle of the waterway. From each of the three platforms, the same exact fireworks are launched simultaneously.

The main purpose of this weekend, though, is the big yard sale to clean up the basement, thus making a bit of room for the newest tenant of this house: me. So the past two days have been about working together as a family to drag things upstairs and into the garage, arrange things on the tables and price everything. Tonight it was my job to hand letter some handsome signs for the neighbourhood. My favourite sign is the one for the door in the morning: “Sale starts at 9:00. Early birds pay double.”

I won’t say it hasn’t been a bit stressful at times. When the stress got to Sylvain, he snapped at his mum. When the stress got to me, I snapped at him. But we have been able to recognize what was happening and make up quickly, wiping away tears to make room for laughter and kisses and lighthearted teasing before settling back into the work at hand.

I’m learning that the key to staying on an even keel is taking good care of myself. I start getting wound down for bed around 9:00 or 9:30. We keep the water coming all day. I stop for snacks or take a break to spend 10 minutes in a room by myself. Or we take a walk to scope out good spots for the signs, breathing in the fresh air and feeling the warm sun on our faces.

I’ve visited Sylvain enough times now to recognize a pattern. I often arrive feeling very stressed and with minor physical complaints, like a rash or stomach ache. By day two I’m feeling energized and the ailments are clearing up or are gone. Sylvain is very supportive of me and encourages good self-care. I begin to relax around him, laugh and smile more.

For the past several weeks in Waterloo, I haven’t felt very sociable. I’ve not felt like wearing my name tag in ages. But Elspeth reminded me that it could be a great way to meet people and make new friends, so I brought it with me and wore it during our outing. Near the public library, which won’t give me a card until I can show something with my name and address on it, I saw Feather Man. Oh, now there’s a great street interview just waiting to happen.

On Monday I turned in my letter of resignation at work.

Wow, eh?

Things are moving along.

Happy Birthday, Lynn

Today I wish to post a tribute to my friend Lynn, whom I have never met.  For years she only barely existed for me in the form of her husband’s name and address in my little address book.  I’ve never met him, either.  The only reason his name made its way into my address book is because he and I are both genealogists who have done digging into my paternal line.  We found each other quite by happenstance.  We have a great-great ( I don’t know how many greats) grandfather in common.  Without even knowing me, he sent me a huge manila envelope stuffed full of copies of the research he’d done on our line.  All I had to offer in return was a photograph of my grandfather on a ship.

Each time I moved, I sent Fred a little note advising of my new address and each time I changed ISPs, I sent an email advising of my new email address.  That’s it.  He was just my anonymous, very distantly related cousin out in California.

And then I started the blog.  I sent a postcard to everyone in my address book.

Fred’s wife, Lynn, took a look at said blog.

Now we are friends.  She shares with me photos from her garden, photos keeping me abreast of her crocheting and knitting projects, her sewing, her new quilting classes!  She is forever encouraging me and helping me believe in myself as a writer.

The internet is an amazing thing.  Friendship is a God thing.  Grace.  You never know when or where or how it’s going to happen.

Happy birthday, my friend!

Miss Olive, Part 5

“She sometimes forgets who I am,” I said.

Mama and I were seated on bar stools in her kitchen. I almost always dropped in on my mom in the evening after my day’s work at the public library. Mama’s was not the neatest house on the block. There were often dishes and dirty pots and pans still in the sink from the previous night’s dinner. There might be untidy stacks of newspapers and magazines in the living room, as well as a half-full jug of cheap red wine beside her easy chair. But my mama’s house was the one the neighbors gravitated to in the evenings after their workdays.

Nobody ever knocked. At my mama’s house, you just open the door, stick your head in and holler. You can wait for her to holler back or just come on in. Come on back to the kitchen and make yourself comfortable on one of the bar stools. If my mom’s not already back there fixing herself a drink and cutting up carrots, pretty soon she will be. Before you know it the bar will be covered in boxes of crackers, cheese spreads, pickled this and marinated that.

“But if I tell her enough times, she eventually gets it!”

====

I was very pleased to have discovered this little trick. Miss Olive’s short term memory was shot. She might have to ask me seven times during the same visit who I was and how we’d met. But then on about my fifth visit and during my third recitation of who I was and how we’d met, she got it.

“You taught my mother in the third grade,” I said again, just as I’d said it to her nine minutes earlier.

“But I didn’t teach you?” she’d ask each time, puzzled by the lack of logic in the whole thing.

“No, just my mama. We were taking a walk this one day and I suggested we knock on your door and come say hello. I wanted to meet you. “

She stared at me, still not quite comprehending.

“My mama didn’t come back, but I came back! You and I are friends now,” I’d tell her. “We visit all the time.”

Then Miss Olive would clap her hands together and thank her God in the ceiling “for sending me this child.”

Then on about the fourteenth recitation of the story, she stopped me and interrupted, providing the ending. “I taught your mother!”

She was very proud of herself. That’s how I learned that there was a way to move information from Miss Olive’s short-term memory drawer over into her long-term memory drawer. It was just a matter of repetition.

Often after one of my visits with Miss Olive, I’d drop in on my mama before retiring to my own home for the night. I’d sit at the counter on a stool and tell my mom all about my visit with her third grade teacher.

“She’s told me ALL about her childhood,” I said as I bit down on a carrot stick.

====

Miss Olive had started out life on a plantation called China Hill. I don’t remember now if it was in Arkansas or Mississippi or just where. Her father hadn’t been the best provider in the whole world. He was a drummer, which Miss Olive explained to me meant traveling salesman. No, he had trouble keeping a job, so Olive’s mother took in piecework, sewing.

Miss Olive loved to tell me about the time she almost died. She was a very little girl and she got measles or scarlet fever or something awful that made her brain nearly fry. The doctor told her mama to prepare herself for the possibility that Olive wouldn’t live. Miss Olive told me she remembers having delirium and dreaming that she was going to heaven.

Her fever broke, though. Not only that, but the doctor was wrong when he predicted that after such a prolonged high fever, Olive would end up deaf or blind or both. When her fever broke, she knew exactly what had happened.

“The angels saved me,” she said, looking me straight in the eye. “They saved me and that’s when I knew.”

“Knew what?” I asked her as if I had not heard the story already.

“Knew why I was spared! I was to dedicate my life to serving God.”

===

It was one of those hotter than hot days, the kind that drives even the most die-hard heat lover indoors. It was the kind of heat that empties golf courses. It was the kind of day that makes you want to take another cold shower after even the shortest foray into the day. After each shower, you have to put on a fresh shirt; the other one is soaking wet even though you only went three blocks to the grocery store.

I was out of eggs and decided that just as soon as it cooled off a bit, I’d walk up to the Kroger store on Highway 10. You’d think that having made that same trip hundreds if not thousands of times since the age of 8 when we moved to Little Rock, I’d remember to put on shoes before heading out. You can’t go inside the grocery store without shoes, you know. But I’d almost always forget. Rather than go all the way back home, I’d just hope the clerks either didn’t notice or wouldn’t say anything to me. I’d grab my purchases and scuttle into the check-out line lickety-split. Once I was in line, the checker couldn’t see my feet.

Coming out of the chain grocery store, I saw the huge, drooping bough of the mulberry tree that grew there between the parking area and the road. Maybe the mulberries are ripe now, I thought, and made my way over to the big shade tree.

Sure enough, the branches were just bursting with the shiny black berries. They were all over the ground, too. I reached up to pluck a berry and put it in my mouth. It was warm from the heat of the day. I picked another then another. I wanted to tell someone, wanted to share the bounty. I looked around. I didn’t see anyone I thought would be very receptive to the idea of dropping what they were doing, forgetting about their errands to join my spontaneous berry harvest.

I’ll bet Miss Olive would like some freshly picked mulberries, I thought. And so I rearranged my groceries into one bag, freeing up the other one as a berry basket. And I picked.

I picked and picked, popping one black, juicy berry into my mouth for every two I dropped in the sack. Soon my feet and fingers and lips were stained purple, and the bottom of my paper sack was covered with berries an inch deep.

That’s enough, I thought.

I was plenty apprehensive about knocking on Miss Olive’s door this time. Ever before it had been so easy to be with her. I had figured out and explained to my friends why I liked spending hours in the company of an old woman.

“She is always full of joy,” I told my friend Andrea. “She is always thanking God for one thing or another,” I told Deb.

But this time. This time she would be grieving, and I wasn’t sure just what I was supposed to do or say to someone who has just lost her sister after 90 years of togetherness.

Nervous as I was, I managed to knock.

After the usual 5-minute wait, Miss Olive was soon standing in the doorway staring at me. The death of her sister seemed to have dealt her a memory set-back.

“I brought you some mulberries, Miss Olive,” I mumbled, shuffling my purple-stained feet on the warm concrete of her porch.

Miss Olive seemed to be in a daze. But I was someone who knew her name and came bearing a gift. I could see in her eyes that she was considering whether to let me in or not. Slowly, she pushed open the screen door so I could come inside.

Trusting I was a friend, or perhaps not caring now, she said to me in a weak and mournful voice, “Beulah’s gone.”

“I know. I know,” I said, and put down my bags so I could give Miss Olive a long hug.

Threshold

I’m scared.

I don’t have any friends in my new town yet.

Do you know one of the thoughts that soothes me?  The extra bedroom that Sylvain is turning over to me is the most beautiful colour you can imagine. I still can’t believe he picked that paint colour.  It is a tint of orchid that practically emits light.  That’s a good thing, because the room is in the basement and so has only a small window up near the ceiling.

When this whole move thing starts to make me hyperventilate,  I imagine that room in its finished state.  I see my little bed with its gorgeous quilt. I see the cotton pillowcases.  I picture my desk with a book case nearby.  Thoughts of that room calm me right down.  I breathe again.

In some moments I am full of faith and hope and excitement.  The next moment I am trembling and weepy.

When I started this short blog post, I was feeling afraid.  Now I’m not.

Last night I had a dream that I was standing with a friend or two, or maybe with Sylvain.  Suddenly a wolf or bear rushed out of the woods toward us.  I was going to fend of its attack with a sharp object I was holding.  But something made me hesitate, not certain this beast meant us harm.  Sure enough, the animal transformed into a friendly dog.

In our dreams, dogs often represent that part of us that is instinctively protective of us.

Sold

The waiver of conditions has been signed.  I am outta here.

I’m still very low on energy, but I’ve begun separating the stuff to box up from the stuff to sell, toss, give away.  I walked up to the corner store and bought little price stickers and have begun the process of turning the living room into a sales floor.

I am grateful to myself for the many weekends I spent back in the spring advertising junk on Freecycle. It’s making this last phase of becoming portable much less intimidating.  I am not overwhelmed.  I can do this.

I am thankful for my ability to pare my material possessions down, down, down.  I’m good at this.  I love feeling light.

Light as a hobo.

No Wonder

I was turned away from the blood donation centre yesterday.  My iron is really, really low.  I watched as the little drop of blood floated right to the top of the vial without any hesitation.  In the past it either sank to the bottom (three cheers for me, I can donate!) or at least hovered around the magic yellow mark on the vial, giving me time to make little cheering noises.  Not this time.  This time it just spread out and floated at the top.

The second type of test gave the nurse an exact number, and I was sent for a little talk with another nurse behind a closed door.

“Have you had problems with your iron levels in the past?”  And, “are you familiar with iron-rich foods?”

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

She made me prove it by listing some.

“Leafy greens, beets, nuts, …”

“Red meat,” she offered.

“I’m a vegetarian,” I said.

This is not fair.  I eat raw broccoli five out of seven days of the week.  But there I was, being sent across the street to the health food store for some Floradix.  I restocked my B12 while I was at it.  Dutifully, I visited the website the nurse recommended, making mental notes of what to eat and what not to eat alongside my iron-rich foods.

No more coffee with breakfast.  Tea and coffee inhibit iron absorption.  Vitamin C aids iron absorption. I had beef and orange juice for dinner.

All the vegetarians reading this can just go screaming from the room right now.

To help with my stress levels, I listened to a relaxation CD my wonderful friend and cousin Lynn sent me. Thank you, Lynn.

At least now I have a label I can put on this blah way I’ve been feeling lately.  At least now I have some steps I can take.  Oh, and if you try Floradix?  Don’t worry. If you keep taking it, after a while it no longer tastes like rain water out of a bucket of rusting nails.

Accepting Help

Sorry to be such a blogging slouch lately. These next weeks are going to be pretty crazy if this sale goes through, as closing will be July 16th. That gives me and Sylvain just enough weekends for each of our yard sales, some packing and some moving. His parents are totally okay with my inhabiting one of the guest rooms. We’ve told them after I find work, we have to see. I might get an apartment close by. We just have to feel our way through this and do what is best for the relationship. Being under the same roof could put too much stress on everyone. We’ll see.

I haven’t forgotten that I’m right in the middle of Miss Olive’s story.

Oh, and here is the Oudot-Robinet armoire, the piece of furniture I went gaga over in MacKenzie Hall on the weekend.

On Sunday before our weekly check-in talk, Sylvain listened as I unburdened myself of a lot of the stress roiling around inside me these days. It’s my perfectionism raising its old, ugly head. It’s vestiges of being the child who had to be low maintenance if not no maintenance. Between me and my brother, I’m the one who feels responsible for others’ happiness, for peace in the family, for…everything. If I am not self-sufficient, I feel uneasy until I get that way again.

I’ve never had a gap between good jobs before. I’ve never left a job unless a better one awaited me. I’ve never let anyone support me between jobs. This feels weird.

On the other hand, I KNOW that there is no growth opportunity inside doing things the same way you’ve always done them. There is no chance for learning and stretching in doing everything for myself all the time. I remember when I moved from one address in Little Rock to a nicer place. Rather than ask any of my friends to help me move, I rented the U-Haul myself. I loaded and unloaded it myself. The loveseat I tipped on end and walked it across the yard, rocking its weight from one corner to the other as I inched it across the distance from truck to house. That is how averse I am to accepting help from others.

Yeah, I’m getting better. This year I asked my friends to babysit my rat Owen while I took off to see Sylvain. But I felt very indebted and couldn’t ask the same friends a second time. My friend Katryn recently let me know she can take Owen into her home again if I have to go away for a weekend. Wow. It’s hard for me to let that sink in. Friends help each other. It’s okay.

But moving into someone’s home while you get on your feet again? That’s a lot. I will try not to break out in a rash thinking about it too much.

Transitions

I’m sitting here in Sylvain’s den listening to Gary’s psychadelic zen guitar improvisation of the week, Rainy Day. It’s very relaxing and comforting. It’s filling me with a calm, “it’s going to be okay” feeling.

I got a second offer on the house. This one is also conditional on inspection, financing and insurance and is also a lower offer than I’d hoped to get. I spent 24 hours mulling over whether to counter-offer a slightly higher amount just so that–after agents and lawyer and mortgage early discharge fee–I could say I broke even.

I did the sit in the Yes chair and sit in the No chair game to see what my heart wants. I considered how I would feel if the potential buyer didn’t accept my counter offer and didn’t make a new offer? Am I willing to sit around several more weeks hoping someone else gets interested in the quirky little house? Heck, I don’t even want to have to mow the lawn a second time this year. I want out. I want to get on with my life. I want to chalk this down to experience and start packing. That is worth $3000 to me–the difference between what this person is offering and what I’d thought was my rock bottom price.

In helping me arrive at this decision, Sylvain asked me, “do you want to call your mom?”

“I already know what she’d say,” I said softly.

“Take it and run?”

“Yeah, that’s what she’d say. She already gave me her ‘you’re young, you can start over, it’s just money’ speech.”

I faxed back my signatures and initials in all the right spots on all five pages.

===

This weekend’s focus has been an exploration of Sylvain’s city. There is no way that in his town I will find one little funky area like Uptown Waterloo where one can walk to organic grocer and indie cinema and coffee shops filled with people wearing Birkenstocks. Ain’t gonna happen. No. This is a city built around a blue-collar industry. For me to find cute little haunts to replace my old ones, I must be creative and put away a few expectations, replacing them with the joy of unanticipated positives about this area.

We’ve started making a list of things this area offers me that my old hometown did not.

So far we have three very solid positives:

1. This town is in the Carolinian zone. That means an earlier spring, a later winter and a whole host of fauna and flora I have not seen since moving from Arkansas to Waterloo eight years ago. I saw an Oriole yesterday in the park. Today a Grey Catbird came to Sylvain’s bird bath.

2. This city has way more restaurants than Waterloo, and many more nice restaurants. Let the culinary tour begin!

3. I can once again listen to my beloved National Public Radio!!! That in itself might make the move worthwhile. Oh, I missed my friends Leane Hansen and Will Shortz SO MUCH!

This city has a very rich history.  On Saturday we were in the original courthouse cum gaol where a quiet man behind a counter stacked with flyers and informational pamphlets softly mentioned that there was a self-guided tour we could take of the building if we wanted to.  The booklet was available for a $2 donation.  Knowing I’m just about the only person on the planet who likes to tour musty old buildings on a beautiful sunny day, I mumbled to Sylvain, “you don’t want to take the tour, do you?”

His face lit up.  “SURE!”

And so we two nerds spent the next forty minutes or so gazing and gawking at old secretaries, flags, inkwells, a wrought iron gibbet mounted on the interior brick wall, 100-year-old political cartoons and (drum roll, please)… a 1740 hand-carved armoire that propelled me into my best Antiques Road Show impressions.  Wow.  Primitively depicted hunters and trophy animals of all sorts populated all panels and sides. I photographed it from every angle until my batteries died.

Photos to come.

Hrmph

Pedro didn’t get the financing.  Poor guy, he was so excited. He was going to put in a shower where my sump pump is. He was going to get a claw-foot tub.  He already had a tenant for the upstairs.  Oh, and the yard! He couldn’t wait to start his garden out there.  But no.

This waiting thing is for the birds.  I make a terrible Taoist.  I no longer feel emotionally invested in where I am, but I can’t yet be where I’m going.  Limbo.

It sucks.

I don’t like it one bit.

I miss Sylvain.  And when I miss him, do you know what I do?

Do you?

I eat.

I eat and eat and eat and eat.

Then I eat some more.

I am getting fat.

Fat, fat, fat.

Here is a picture for you to look at.

This is gelato.  Mmmm. Yummy gelato.  Gelato gooooood.

 

Miss Olive, Part 4

Yes, Beulah was alive.

Miss Olive had told me a a few stories about her sister. She had been very hard of hearing her whole life and had a speech impediment related to that. But I had assumed she had passed on years before. I do not know to this day if Olive kept her sister hidden away in the middle bedroom because she would scare people or because visitors might scare Beulah.

Was Olive ashamed of her handicapped sister? No, come to think of it, that couldn’t be because very shortly after I saw Beulah for the first time, Miss Olive told me she was planning a surprise 90th birthday party for her. I was invited to drop in that day for some cake and ice cream and–of course–to wish Beulah a happy ninetieth.

I wish I could tell you that Olive’s sister was tickled when a gathering of Olive’s friends from church came over to celebrate her big day. I wish I could tell you her eyes lit up when she opened her presents, or that it was her favourite kind of cake.

That is not what happened.

When I arrived, there was already a gathering of ladies from Winfield United Methodist enjoying cake and looking very sharp in their dresses of royal blue and red and white with yellow polka dots. They all had on their pearls and jewels. One tiny woman even had on a corsage. As always, Miss Olive had on cotton slacks that were not long enough for her, so when she sat down, you could see skin above the tops of the white crew socks that she always wore with her sneakers.

Beulah was slumped over in a straight-backed dining room chair with her eyes closed. I imagine it had been a struggle getting her into the satiny dress and brown nylon stockings that were now rumpled and twisted around her legs.

Ever the third grade teacher, Miss Olive was trying to keep every one cheered and entertained. “Oooooh, we have CAKE, Beulah! Look at your cake, Beulah! It has your NAME on it, sweetheart!”

Beulah did not raise her chin off her chest. She did not open her eyes. Her hands lay limp in her lap.

“Come on, sweetie,” Olive coaxed, “all these people are here to see you! They brought presents. Come on and open your presents, honey.”

Olive cajoled and poked, but Beulah did not stir. When Olive tried raising her sister’s head up, forcing her to attend her surroundings, Beulah grunted and returned to her slouched state. I don’t know if she was sleepy, dying or just playing possum in order to hide from the frightening group of people. Whatever the case, first one and then another of the eight or nine white-haired women gathered for the festivities suggested we let poor Beulah be.

“Poor thing, let’s leave her in peace,” one said.

“She can open her presents later,” I offered.

“The cake is delicious,” another one said, trying to distract Olive from her self-imposed responsibility for the perfect party.

Embarrassed, I thought up an excuse to leave after a very short while. “It was nice to meet you all,” I said to the clutch of ladies, though I really hadn’t met any of them, and backed toward the door.

One evening not very long after the party, I passed by Miss Olive’s house to find an ambulance parked outside. Two paramedics emerged from the house with Beulah on one of those gurneys with collapsible wheeled legs. They loaded her up and drove away without lights or sirens.

Darla was in the doorway. I walked up to the porch and looked at her questioningly.

“It won’t be long,” she told me. “She isn’t eating or drinking. Once they won’t take water, the end is very near. I’ve seen it every time.”

I turned and began my walk back home, wondering what I would be able to say or do in the coming days to help my friend Miss Olive in her time of loss.

photo: Lynn C.

Miss Olive, Part 3

The next time I stood knocking on Miss Olive’s door, the gardenia bush by the front stoop was in bloom. If you are not from the South, you may not know what that flower’s fragrance is like. It is heavy and almost sickly sweet, like the orange blossoms of my California childhood or the night-blooming Jasmine whose perfume led me by the nose right to the wrought iron gates of the botanical gardens in Valencia, Spain.

Darla answered the door this time. Seems Olive had fallen asleep in her easy chair and Darla didn’t want to disturb her. She invited me in anyway.

Darla was somewhere between my age and my mother’s age, a bit plump, with short auburn hair, dark brown eyes and ruddy, freckled skin. She looked to me like one of those people who has worked very hard their whole lives. With Miss Olive snoozing, Darla and I had a chance to chat.

From Darla I gathered many of the missing details of Olive’s existence. I learned that a lady at the bank handled Olive’s money for her. Someone who does that is called a trustee, Darla explained.

“Why does Miss Olive need a trustee?” I asked.

“Because if it were left up to Olive, she would just write check after check to those charities,” Darla explained. “She can’t keep up with things like that anymore.”

I thought about all the letters and pamphlets from non-profit organizations littering the back room: World Wildlife Fund, Sierra Club, UNICEF.

“The trustee sees that I get paid, the bills get paid, the grass gets cut, and Olive gets some spending money,” Darla said as she settled us into the dining room. Darla told me she did Olive’s housekeeping, a bit of cooking and spent the night in a small room off the back of the house.

As Darla talked, I lost myself in the Japanese prints on the wall behind her: proud chrysanthemum blossoms; a tiny frog on a stalk of bamboo; goldfish with paper-thin fins swimming under the frothy surface of a pond.

The north wall was a bank of windows across which three glass shelves had been mounted. The shelves held Olive’s beloved collection of African Violets.

When I heard movement behind my back, I turned around.

There in the doorway of the middle bedroom stood the closest thing to a specter I have ever seen. It was an old, old woman wearing nothing but a thin, worn and faded summer nightgown. Her unkempt silver hair fell past her shoulders. Her bleary eyes held a look beyond defeat. It was as if she had already begun to leave this world.

“Beulah, hon,” Darla said very loudly to the ghost-like figure in the doorway, “let’s get your slippers on.”

Writing

After I wrote part one of my recollections of my friend Miss Olive Smith and got so many kind and encouraging comments, it surprised and delighted me.  It also made me a little (ok, a lot) self-conscious about continuing to put the story down.  Suddenly I felt pressure to write well. After all, I had a waiting audience.  Eep!

I have never taken a single creative writing course.  I know there is a lot to be learned and I want to learn it.  I started a book a while back and have read many of the chapters of it.  It’s called Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark.  It’s easy to read and contains some lovely information about the rhythm and musicality of writing.

When I found myself blocked and unable to put down part 2 of Miss Olive’s story, I thought a trip to the library might help me.  People, I found this really neat book called Writing Life Stories: How to Make Memories into Memoirs, Ideas into Essays, and Life into Literature by Bill Roorbach.

This guy is good.  The chapter I’m reading now is helpful beyond measure.  He is teaching me the difference between scene-building and voice-over.  Show, don’t tell.  Well, okay, I knew that or thought I knew that.  My grade school English teachers and high school teacher and university composition profs told us that.  You don’t tell your reader, “she was beautiful.”  You describe her and let your readers draw their own conclusion.  No problem. I can describe stuff, places, people.

What I didn’t realize is how insidious the tendency is to interrupt your own scene building with voice-over.

“A new family was moving in across the street…” is not as strong as “When I woke up Sunday morning, there was a U-Haul parked across from…”  Your readers can figure out that a new family is moving in.  Just show them.

Neat, eh?  Roorbach encourages us to go back over what we’ve written with a very critical eye looking for the places where we’ve interrupted the flow of our scene building and inserted a voice-over.  He’s not saying all voice-over is bad, but the instances of it that interrupt the flow of a scene are bad. Find them, replace them with more scene.  He calls that “cracking open.”

I am loving this book.  I hope you will enjoy the results of my having read it!

Superstitions

Elspeth’s post about Trinidad & Tobago superstitions inspired me to think about Ozarks superstitions. Here are some that were cataloged by the late, great folklorist Vance Randolf in his work Ozark Magic and Folklore.

If a woman drops her dishrag, company is coming.
If a woman’s nose itches then unexpected company will arrive.
If your right eye itches then bad luck will follow.
If your left eye itches then good luck will follow.
If your ears burn then someone is saying something about you.
Sneezes and they day they occurred were important as demonstrated by the following rhyme.
Sneeze on Monday–kiss a stranger.
Sneeze on Tuesday–a letter will arrive.
Sneeze on Wednesday–good luck will follow.
Sneeze on Thursday–bad luck will follow.
Sneeze on Friday–sorrow will follow.
Sneeze on Saturday–you will find a new friend.
Sneeze on Sunday and the devil will be with you all week.
If you run out of salt you will suffer a whole years poverty.
It is bad luck to return borrowed dishes unwashed.
If two friends are walking and a third party walks between them then the two friends must turn their backs to each other to avoid a quarrel.
You should always leave by the same door you came in from.
A rock with a hole in it is very good luck.
It is bad luck to pick up a black button.
Always break bread–never cut it with a knife.
Always put your right shoe on first.
It is unlucky to cut your fingernails on Sunday.
If a girl wants a new dress she should catch a butterfly of the same color and mash it between her teeth.
Any job you start on Saturday will take six weeks to complete.
Never use the wood from a tree struck by lightning.
Thunder and lightning causes milk to spoil.
If you find your initials in a spider’s web you will be lucky all of your life.
Misfortunes and deaths always come in threes.
It is lucky to celebrate Christmas on “Old Christmas” (January 6th).
Whatever you do on New Years Day you will do all year.
Never take anything out of you house on New Years Day.
A woman who drops her comb while brushing her hair is doomed to bad luck.
The above can take the curse off by counting to 10 backwards immediately.

What superstitions did you hear growing up?

Miss Olive, Part 2

I wanted to go back to visit Miss Olive, but my shyness had the better of me. And so I simply thought about Miss Olive each time I passed by her house. Sometimes I could see a light on in the back room and I imagined Miss Olive in there watching television all by herself.

A U-Haul truck was parked directly across from the little 1920s-era bungalow my brother and I rented from my mom and step-father. I watched as two adults and a boy of about 12 went back and forth between moving van and house with boxes. One small girl with thick, wavy, strawberry blond hair that fell across one eye brought her dolls and doll-sized chair out of the moving van to set them up on the sidewalk.

I looked around my own sunny dining room, my eyes landing on the Raggedy Ann sitting in a little antique high chair in the corner. I’d gotten each of the two items at different garage sales, adding to a collection of toys that was an attempt to give myself the idyllic childhood I’d not had.

In my bright living room were two more dolls, primitive folk dolls I’d made myself–one boy, one girl–propped in a little shaker chair reading a tiny copy of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are.

I looked back out the open front door at the small girl in her little jean shorts and white sandals and white top with pink trim, wondering what it must be like to move to a whole new neighborhood when you’re four or five years old.

I stepped out onto my porch. My cat Isis was rolling in the yellow pollen on the sidewalk, oak tree catkins tangled in her long and wavy belly fur. The sky was bluer than blue, dotted by a few small white clouds.

“Hi,” I called across to the tiny girl with the dolls.

The girl looked up at me.

“Maybe sometime your dolls would like to come have tea with my dolls,” I said loudly from across the street.

My new small neighbor stood up a bit straighter, pushed her wild, flax-colored hair out of her face with one hand and said, “OKAY!”

===

I’d gotten my first real job (assuming you don’t count babysitting as a real job) at the public library as a clerk on the bookmobile. I’d managed to impress my two interviewers with my thorough familiarity with the Dewey decimal system.

“I know the Library of Congress system of classification too,” I added. “That’s what they use at the university library. Dewey Decimal is a lot easier,” I said.

I was hired.

Most days my job was fun and not too difficult. But this one day I was being trained for a new duty. The beloved old bookmobile was being retired, so they had to find something else for me to do. Miss Thwing–who to me bore an uncanny resemblance to Shelley Duval–was trying to teach me how to fulfill interlibrary loan requests.

The training wasn’t going so well, though the process seemed simple enough.

• Find requested book or books in stacks.
• Check out book to other library.
• Put book or books in padded mailer along with self-addressed mailing label.
• Insert one Terms of Loan sheet.
• Address package.
• Seal package.

Easy, right?

Wrong.

Miss Thwing spied on me from behind the glass wall of her office. Nervously, she emerged from her office to peek over my shoulder and assess my system. It was no wonder I had to open packages up again to see which books were inside, having forgotten to write the address on the outside BEFORE I sealed the mailer. I needed a different system, she informed me.

And so I listened as she suggested a logical order of operations. I nodded with much seriousness and even took notes, then waited for her to walk away and stop staring at me.

Why did they have to retire the bookmobile? I was so happy on the bookmobile. I was still grumbling when I arrived home from work that day. I was feeling fragile, criticized, unappreciated. As I rounded the corner from Cantrell onto North Harrison in my little Pacific Blue Yugo, I thought, I’ll go see Miss Olive. I’ll bet SHE will appreciate me.

I didn’t even change out of my work clothes before heading right over to Miss Olive’s house. The house looked dark, but I knocked anyway.

I waited.

Nobody came to the door.

I knocked again, harder this time.

Finally I heard stirring inside the house; my heart leaped. The door opened and Miss Olive stood there peering out at me from the cool of her sitting room. She stared at me expectantly.

“Hi, Miss Olive! Um,…do you feel like a visitor just now?” I ventured, suddenly feeling much less sure of myself.

“Do I know you?” Miss Olive asked.

“I’m Kelly,” I said. “You taught my mom in the third grade, remember?”

“I DID?” Miss Olive exclaimed, opening the door a bit wider.

“Do you feel like a visitor? Because if you don’t, I can come back another time,” I said as I stepped back toward the edge of the porch, pantomiming how easily I could make myself disappear were it not a convenient time for a visit.

“No, no, you come in here,” Miss Olive said, waving me in out of the hot and humid summer evening. She was wearing a black tee shirt with a picture of the cosmos–glittery galaxies swirling across the front.

You could learn a lot about Miss Olive Smith just by looking around her sitting room. First of all, there were the plaques and awards of appreciation for years and years of service to the United Methodist Church, to the Methodist Youth and I don’t know what all. On the opposite side of the room a wood effigy of St. Francis of Assisi stood calm and loving, his hand outstretched, birds perched on his arm and shoulder.

Miss Olive lead me through the dining room and through the kitchen back to the little den where she spent all her time sitting in her easy chair, a stack of reading material on the floor by her side. Lying about here and there were pamphlets and letters from various charitable organizations soliciting donations.

On the wall were two small framed prints like I’d seen in antiques shops–the kind with romantic pastoral scenes that seemed to have been made by applying colour by hand to a photograph or daguerreotype. I imagined the colorizing had to be done with a very tiny paint brush and very steady hand. The television was on but the volume was low. The program was a fund raising telethon for aid to the starving children on another continent.

Miss Olive settled into the easy chair and I sat on the ottoman nearby.

“Now then, I want to hear ALL about you,” she said. And so I began.

When Miss Olive understood who I was and why I was there, that I was just a neighbor who wanted to pass the time talking to her, she clapped her hands together and looked up at the ceiling.

“God,” she said, “thank you for sending me this child.”

I wasn’t quite sure what to do while Miss Olive talked with God. I smiled awkwardly and looked around the room, hoping the Amen would come soon. What I came to learn about Miss Olive was that there was no beginning and no end to her chats with God. She was in continual conversation with this entity who resided in the direction of the ceiling.

When it came time for me to go home, Miss Olive stood and walked me to the door. With her long, slender arms she gave me a nice hug and a playful slap on the fanny, too.

I nearly skipped home. Fireflies were glinting in the dusking sky. I couldn’t wait to tell my Mama all about my visit with her third grade teacher. Now I understood why my mother could not stop talking about this woman. There was something about her. Being in her presence was like being in the same room with an angel. Love energy surrounded her like a golden aura.

I couldn’t wait to go back again soon.

Hydrangea by Lynn C.

Crossing Paths

I kicked around the house a long time this morning before a whim grabbed me to pick up my house key and head out for a stroll and to find something to eat.  I had walked the three blocks to King and was just rounding the corner when I saw him.  He was headed south, I was headed north.  We smiled at one another–house seller and house buyer–long before we were close enough to start a conversation.

“What a coincidence, eh?” Peter asked me.

“My friends are all praying for you to get the financing approved,” I said, shielding my eyes from the sun as we stood in the sidewalk, forcing people to go around us.

Peter gushed about his plans for the house, for the garden.  “I already have a tenant for upstairs,” he said.  I’m going to turn your sewing room into my bedroom.”

He is geeked. He is totally geeked.

“I’ve had five houses,” he told me.  “Three ex-wives.  Wife always got to keep the house,” he said matter 0f factly, without bitterness.  “But they didn’t get my PENSIONS!” he added with a grin.

I nodded.

“I was looking at a place that’s 240,000.  But I don’t want to be house poor.  I like to travel, you know.  I have to be able to travel.”

We stood there talking way longer than my growling belly wished we had.  I bade him a good day as a couple more people he knew came upon us and started talking to him.

Yes, yes, I know.  On with the story about Miss Olive.  I’m working on it, I promise.

Soon, very soon.

Oh, and PS: I got a Couch Surfing request, my first!  It is from an independent filmmaker whose film is being screened here in town on Monday as part of the Non Violence International Film Festival.  He is coming in from the states for that and needs a place to crash.  Will he choose my couch?  I don’t know yet.

Miss Olive, Part 1

Miss Olive this, Miss Olive that. My mama could go on and on about that one particular teacher, the one she’d had for third grade at Forest Park Elementary. That’s the same elementary school I’d gone to when she’d brought my little brother and me back to Little Rock, Arkansas from Fresno, California in 1971. My father had died two years earlier and mom decided to come back home where she would have the support of my grandparents.

My teacher in 1971 had been Virginia Teague. My mother’s third grade teacher in 1938 had been Miss Olive Smith, who–according to my mom–was THE sweetest, most wonderful teacher on God’s green earth.

I must have heard the puppy story five times if I heard it once. All the kids in Miss Olive’s third grade class got together and bought her a puppy and put it in her waste basket to surprise her. She was very happy and very surprised. But Miss Olive lived with her sister on the corner of North Harrison and Cantrell Road. Cantrell is a very busy street. Unfortunately, the doggie managed to dig under the fence and run into the road, where it was struck by a car and killed.

Miss Olive came to school with red, puffy eyes. The next day, the children put a new puppy in the waste basket.

And this one. I must have heard this one seven or eight times. Every day when Miss Olive Smith walked home for lunch, the children would run up and surround her. One child would grab her left hand and another would latch onto her right hand. The next two children to cluster around her would take the free hands of the two children who were already attached to lovely Miss Olive. And so it went until Miss Olive had a string of children growing out of each of her arms as she walked home for lunch each day.

“We loved her so much. We just wanted to be around her all the time. She made us feel loved and special,” my mom explained.

One hot Arkansas evening when I was in my mid-twenties, my mother and I were taking a stroll around the neigbhourhood. As we came around the corner onto North Harrison Street and Mama saw the house where Miss Olive had lived with her sister and one poor, doomed puppy after another, she got to talking about her for the millionth time.

“What ever happened to her, Mom?” I asked.

“As far as I know, she still lives there,” Mama answered.

I stood stock still in the street, the asphalt burning my bare soles. “Well, what are we waiting for, then? Why don’t we go say hi to her?”

My very shy mother came up with reason after another why we should not go knock on Miss Olive’s door.

“She wouldn’t remember me,” she said.

“Come ON, Mom,” I said, rolling my eyes and dragging my mother by the hand. Sometimes my mother has what I like to call social anxiety. Sometimes I do, too. But sometimes I don’t. It all depends on the circumstances. On this warm summer evening, I was feeling adventuresome.

My mom started to giggle and try to talk me out of knocking. I was knocking.

Soon the door opened and then the screen door opened, too. Holding it ajar was a tall, lanky woman in her early 90s with wild white hair and thick glasses that made her eyes look huge.

“HI,” I said. “I am Kelly and this is my mother Dottie. You taught her in the third grade,” I announced.

“I DID?” Miss Olive exclaimed with the same overdone tone of pride and surprise that third grade teachers probably cannot shed after so many decades in the classroom.

Miss Olive insisted we come right inside and let her see us up close. At first I thought my mother was going to stay out on the porch while I pranced right inside the cool, dark living room. But she followed me inside where we both took chairs in Miss Olive’s sitting room. Miss Olive turned on a lamp.

I sat and listened while Miss Olive and my mother got reacquainted. She offered us tea and cookies that her “girl” Darla had just made.

“No, no, we can’t stay long,” we protested. And we didn’t stay too long, seeing as our visit was unannounced. When we stood to go, Miss Olive asked me who I was again, asking, “Did I teach you, too?”

“No, no. You just taught my mother,” I reminded her.

“You come back anytime,” she told us. I could tell by the way she said it that she meant it. She really hoped this wouldn’t be our last and only visit.

My mother never did go back. But me? Little did I know, but Miss Olive Smith was about to become my new best friend.

Moments… (written by Sylvain)

As Kelly said, after her last visit here, I told her it was my turn, time for me to visit her fishbowl–the city I had heard so much about and which I’d visited often for other business but had never really spent time in. I wanted to see where she lived, shopped and did laundry. I wanted just to be with her, doing the things she does, in the places she does them. I wanted to be in her world. And that is just what we did.

I took Friday afternoon off work and headed out eagerly on the 3 hour drive. I arrived around 4:30 pm and met Kelly at her home. The ramp I had rented worked perfectly and soon I was in her kitchen where she prepared a very delicious dinner for us.

After dinner and a few odds and ends around the house, we headed for the hotel. I had checked in already and although the hotel was quite nice and had just opened that wing two months ago, I was stunned to find it less than completely accessible. Luckily since I wasn’t alone, it worked out quite well. The room was spacious with a separate bedroom, fridge, microwave, and, oh the guys will appreciate this, two, count them, two flat panel LCD HDTVs. No, lol, we did not watch TV. I really watch mostly news, and I honestly forgot about the hockey game. But that’s another story.

Kelly did a great job of recapping our weekend, so I thought I would spend a few minutes going over some highlights she didn’t mention.

One such highlight was lunch at Ye’s on Saturday. I am not huge fan of sushi, but to be honest, I don’t think I have ever really had GOOD sushi. Clearly Ye’s is a favorite of Kelly’s, so it was on my “must-do” list. I can honestly say I really enjoyed it!! Kelly was careful to pick out things that were not too fishy for me, and we both left there completely stuffed!

Shopping was also a lot of fun. I really do love shopping with Kelly. It was a perfectly casual day with no schedule; wandering around was the plan, and we did it well. Too bad about LaSenza not having anything either one of us liked. But to be honest, she looks great in any one of my T-shirts! :)

And then suddenly, the blog stalker leaped out at us!! Lol…kidding. Kat, if you read this, and I know you will, that was way cool. Thank you for making our day. If I remember right, when Kelly pointed to me and was about to introduce me, Kat jumped in and said, “yes, Sylvain, I know.” Wow. And you even pronounced my name properly. I felt like a star.

One of the other things we did together was laundry. Yes, that’s right. We did laundry. We stopped by her home, picked up her laundry and went to her favorite laundromat. I LOVED it. I rummaged through my change in the van for enough money to get the washers going until we could walk across the plaza to a bank machine. Then we went to second cup and we came back and sat and talked and held hands through the wash and dry cycles. Quality time, in Kelly’s world, doing what Kelly does. Heaven.

The Gelato place was great. While I was waiting outside I noticed one of the tables on the patio outside was speaking Parisian French. When Kelly came out, we were able to get the table right next to them, so I motioned for Kelly to lean into me and I whispered in her ear for her to sit on that side and listen to the other table. I knew her eyes would light up. I waited for it. They did. She has such beautiful eyes.

We also visited Waterloo Park on Sunday. There was a pond with plenty of ducks and geese, a couple of white swans and even a Great Blue Heron.

We found a spot under a gazebo and Kelly sat with her feet on my lap. We talked and watched the fish jump and the goofy looking baby geese swim around.

There were all kinds of moments like that; moments were I felt just a little closer to her, moments I won’t soon forget.

Let’s go back to Lunch a Ye’s.

You know how there are moments when you feel yourself fall a little deeper in love?

While we were looking for parking, I had noticed a live band playing outside about a block from the restaurant. They sounded pretty good, and I love live music, so I suggested we go and check it out as we were leaving the restaurant.

We walked over to the open area and the music poured out and struck us just as we stepped into the hot sun. The band was playing a long extended bluesy version of Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side. It was a scorcher on Saturday, and Kelly was wearing a light little dress with spaghetti straps.

As we stepped into the sun and music, her body began to move. She was dancing. For a split second, I was my typical self, “no no…stop that” I thought, “people will look”. As I said, that lasted a split second. Then I was lost. Lost in her beauty. Lost in the way her body moves. Lost in her energy.

Yes, people were looking, so what? How could they not look at someone so free, so full of life, enjoying herself on such a hot day. And they were smiling, and the lead singer, commented “yeah, get down girl!” and that snapped me out of my trance, and everyone in the band was smiling. And I was smiling too. Then I lost myself in her again. There was nobody else there. Just her. And she danced. For me. Yeah. One of those moments….

My Fish Bowl

Sylvain and I have spent a lot of time discussing what has gone wrong in our previous relationships. One pattern he knows I don’t wish to repeat is my tendency to do more compromising of my lifestyle than the other person, more crawling into his world than he does into mine, more giving up of what makes me me than is healthy. When Sylvain was nothing more than a profile on a dating site making a bid for my attention and I gave him many reasons why I doubted we had anything in common, he said that was okay. The water in his fish bowl was murky and stagnant. He would come to my fish bowl and see what it was like.

Yet once we became involved, I found myself readying myself to move to his town. Why do we see me there and not him here? For one, he has built a lovely wheelchair-accessible home where the co-housing arrangement with his sister and parents is working just fine. For another, he has a good job he isn’t itching to leave. When we met, my house was already up for sale and I was feeling it might be time for me to make a career shift of some sort.

Until my house sells and I make a decision about where to live next, whether to visit my mom in Arkansas and if so how long to stay there, we are seeing each other every other weekend. Weekend one was spent in Niagara Falls. Meeting on neutral territory was a good idea. For weekend two and three, I rented a car and drove to his city. At the end of our long Victoria Day weekend, Sylvain said to me, “Next time I’m coming to your fish bowl.”

Because my 1908 house is not accessible, this means booking a hotel room for 3 nights. Clearly it makes more sense for me to go there where lodging is free, but Sylvain knew it would mean a lot to me for him to come see and get to know the town I will probably soon be leaving, the community that feels like one big extended family to me.

He arrived just in time for dinner; I was making chicken quesadillas for him and veggie ones for me.  We unfolded the ramp he rented for the weekend, allowing him into the main floor of my house (bathrooms are upstairs and in basement–none on main floor).  He got to meet Owen, who bruxed and boggled under Sylvain’s skritches.  Owen has never boggled for me!

After dinner Sylvain patiently watched as I did some weeding of the front yard in anticipation of Saturday’s open house.  Oh, and yes, I did find someone to cut the grass in back.  I arrived home Friday to find a KW Contractor paper in my mailbox, opened it right up to the landscaping ads and called one then another number until I found someone able to come immediately.  A very nice young man named Brad came within two hours and mowed the virgin jungle that hadn’t been cut at all this year.  Coming away with a big, bleeding raspberry bush gash across one arm,  Brad earned his fee.

Saturday was a gorgeous, sunny day that included strolling the entire length of King Street through Uptown Waterloo.  Sylvain had his first ever panini at Princess Cafe. He saw my indie cinema and bookstore, my organic food mart and the dress shops where I get my sewing ideas. By happenstance, my friend Katryn passed by on her bike and said hi.  At another point my friend G1 honked at us as he passed by with his friend and neighbour J.

One thing Sylvain had his heart set on was taking me shopping for something to wear.  Oh, weeeeelllll, if you INSIST.  And so we hopped across the street from the hotel to the mall.  We were meandering in and out of shops feeling cotton sundresses in American Eagle, trying in vain to find something in stock in my size and the style we both liked in La Senza.  I haven’t met too many men who enjoy going from store to store, waiting outside dressing rooms, understanding when a decision isn’t forthcoming.  That’s Sylvain’s idea of a fun time.

Just as we were turning into another store,  I thought I heard my name being called.  Before I could decide whether I really was being hailed, I heard my name again very clearly.

“Kelly?”

I turned to find the source of the woman’s voice and met the gaze of someone I was pretty sure I’d never seen before.  I stared at the lovely young woman who was walking through the mall with her family and hoped she would forgive me for not remembering where we’d met.  That is one of those incidents that makes two seconds feel like an eternity.

She took me off the hook.  “You don’t know me from anywhere,” she said.

Pause.  Ok, then… how on earth?

“I’m a blog stalker.  I’ve read your blog.  I recognized you from the picture he took.”  She explained whose blog lead her to mine and said she’d been reading for a few months.

I was speechless.  Wow kazow!  Kikipotamus the Hobo: recognized in public.  How cool is that?  Kat introduced herself and I introduced Sylvain.

“The rib is better,” he said to her, patting his right side.

We continued with our shopping but for the rest of the day, we kept coming back to that event, going over it again and again.  Wow.

We ended Saturday night with gelato in Uptown, running into four of my female coworkers who were also headed to Whole-Lotta-Gelato.  The gelateria has a step out front, so Sylvain asked me to choose a flavour for him. “You know me, I trust you,” he said.

“No, I don’t know your tastes yet.  I’ll write down the flavours and come back so you can choose.” I carry a small notebook and pen in my purse, so I jotted them all down and sprang back onto the sidewalk to read them off and get his order.  Back in the long line I studied the list of flavours, trying to make up my mind. The couple behind me got my attention.  The husband asked me, “Excuse me. I don’t mean to be rude or nosy, but… why do you have all the flavours written down in a little book?”

I told him.  They smiled.  We passed them again on the sidewalk later and exchanged wishes for a fantastic evening.

Over paninis in Princess Cafe, watching the crowd come out of the cinema after Waitress and Away from Her, Syvlain commented, “I think I see what you mean now. This town does have a different feel to it.  There’s a certain energy. I can’t really put my finger on it.”

Yeah.

Last night there was an email from my realtor, a report from the open house:

I had 6 couples through.

Interesting. The first lady loved it, the 2nd client was from apartments out the back and when he saw her name on the sing in sheet, he said she should have the house , waitress , works very hard etc…..he knew her, she is getting pre-approved this week.

there was a father with a son in University and thought this might be a cheap way to go and get some other students to live with him…still undecided.

An older couple , but the stairs …..no, no.

An invester , going to get back to me this week and another I assume nosy neighbour.

We shall see.