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Wynded Words

~ Home of author Sarah Wynde

Category Archives: House

Palmetto State Park

02 Thursday Mar 2017

Posted by wyndes in Food, Grace, House, Personal, Serenity

≈ 8 Comments

wildflowers at sunrise

Wildflowers at sunrise

At the Onion River Campground in Vermont, I walked Zelda through fields of high, dry weeds with scattered faded flowers, surrounded by deep green grass and trees with leaves that were just starting to hint at autumn, and felt like we were in the essence of late summer. I think it’s why I remember that place with so much pleasure.

At Palmetto State Park in Texas, we are in the essence of spring. It is pure spring, all around us. Trees with soft green leaves unfurling, growing so fast that it feels like if you look away for an instant they will have changed when you look back. Wildflowers — yellow and white and purple and pink — some tiny, hiding in the grass, others standing tall and proud. A robin sitting on the branch outside my window as I write. White-tailed deer leaping through the trees at sunrise. Sweet olive trees covered in white flowers, their fragrance drifting on the breeze. One of the sweet olive trees — the biggest one I have ever seen — hummed as I approached it, mysterious until I realized it was the hum of a thousand happy bees. (I then cautiously moved away because, okay, humming tree, fascinating and cool; hundreds upon hundreds of bees, totally scary.)

My day here yesterday was… I want to say spectacular, but it was spectacular in a really quiet way. Zelda and I walked the San Marcos River Trail a little after sunrise. It was beautiful and lovely. We saw the site of the old mud boils, quiet now, but still noted with a sign. (Otherwise I wouldn’t have known what I was looking at). The trail was smooth, well-maintained, shockingly litter-free, and starts about twenty steps away from our campsite. It was a perfect morning walk, chilly enough to need a jacket, overcast, but not raining, a good length, interesting things to look at.

I did some work, including updating my work blog, texted with some friends, did some knitting, made myself a delicious lunch — scrambled eggs with chorizo, brown rice, goat Gouda, avocado, mushroom, and green onion (as posted on Instagram), and ate it sitting outside looking at the view. The sky was clearing, and the air was warming.

Then Z and I went for another walk, in a different direction. We crossed the river at a low point, which for her meant wading and for me meant hopping along the stones at the edges of the paved walkway, the rest of which had water flowing across it. I felt slightly ridiculous and yet also had that little kid thrill of knowing that if I fell, I would splash.

Back at the camper, I wrote. Good words. On Grace! First time in a long while that I didn’t feel like I was trying to fix something broken, but just letting the characters be who they were. We went for another walk. I sat outside on my new camp chair ($6 at Walmart and so much more comfortable than the $50 backpacking chair that I started out with) in the sunshine, warm enough to not need my jacket, and tried to write some more. Then Z wanted to be on my lap, so instead I snuggled her and felt so grateful to be in that moment, in that chair, with my dog licking my face. At sunset, we went for another walk. We ate dinner. I wrote some more.

Then I heard a rustling and caught a mouse in my trash can. Yes! A mouse. Serenity has mice. I can’t even…* I realized Tuesday that I had a mouse problem and it really ruined that day for me. Yesterday I let it go–nothing to do about it until I get on the road again–until one of them fell into the trash can. I carried it outside and released it, telling it to watch out for owls. Unfortunately, it was either not the only mouse or it came right back inside, because there was one after my granola this morning. Gah. So today I will be buying traps and repellent while I’m on my way to my next park.

But I didn’t let the mice stress me out yesterday. Yesterday, I enjoyed a perfect spring day. And not just a perfect spring day. My day, the day that I wanted.

A year ago, I was just starting to think about this adventure. I hadn’t decided to do it yet. I could still look around my house and think, wait, this is the home that I worked so hard for, the place where I wanted to live forever, my fantasy house. The window seat with its cushion made from material my mom and I found at a garage sale, the French doors, the bougainvillea, the neighborhood with its ponds and birds, the kitchen that is exactly right… was I really going to let it all go?

Yesterday was the day for which I let it go.

sunset moon

This sunset is worth a mouse or two.

*”I can’t even…” feels like a complete statement to me, but it sure looks odd when written down. So, you know, envision it with the head shake and wince of pain and hands spread wide that it needs in order to make sense. 

Edited to add: OMG, the showers–so much water pressure, so hot! Not new and fancy, your basic rundown campground shower, but the best shower I’ve had in months.

The big day

25 Monday Jul 2016

Posted by wyndes in House, Personal, RV, Serenity, Travel

≈ 5 Comments

Yesterday was a perfect day. Not just a nice day, not just a good day, but an authentically perfect day.

I’d been dreading it for weeks. My last full day in my house, my last moment to say good-bye. I expected loneliness and sorrow, regret and probably some worry about the future. Instead, I puttered around, moving stuff from one place to another. I went for a walk with a friend, cleaned and swam, saw another friend, ran some errands. Spent half an hour on the phone with R, made a snack sort of lunch, swam some more. Cleaned some more, went out and saw some other friends, made dinner in Serenity — a salad of mixed greens, turkey chunks, pecans, and dried apricots, with a balsamic and peach honey mustard vinaigrette.

And at about 9, when I was tired and ready to sleep, instead I went back into the house and out to the swimming pool and lit the torches and swam by firelight under a starry sky. It was lovely, so beautiful as I floated in the still water, watching the colors of the flames against the backdrop of the green leafy bamboo. The sweet olive tree was even blooming a little again, making the whole backyard smell tropical. It was as magical as I could have imagined, maybe even more so.

The only not quite perfect thing about the day was that poor Zelda was so tired from staying two inches away from me while I wandered around that when I swam she didn’t play with her ball. Instead she slept, as if she was grateful for the chance to get some rest while I was contained. She, of course, doesn’t know that it’s going to be her last chance to play in a pool for a while.

But even that’s okay. I’ve been fighting to keep her ears healthy — drops every morning, cleaning them every day — but I’m pretty sure that I’ve failed and that she’s working on infections, maybe in both. It would be impossible to keep her out of the pool if we were home, but her ears will have a chance to stay dry when we’re on the road. And if I decide in a few days that this is an infection that needs more than Zymox, I can find a Banfield on the road and use her wellness plan to see a vet pretty much anywhere.

And today — well, today’s the big day. I shouldn’t be writing a blog post, I should be finishing cleaning out the house, making last decisions about all the things left inside, dragging the trash out to the curb. Maybe scrubbing the kitchen floor — I did a fairly half-hearted job yesterday. Definitely finishing emptying the fridge and cleaning it out. Checking the laundry situation, maybe making a last run to Goodwill. Oh, and cleaning my bathroom.

I suspect that today is both going to fly by and have long moments where it feels like it’s dragging, but at 2PM, I will sign the papers. One set of dreams will come to an end, but another will begin. I have no idea where I’m going to be spending the night, whether I’ll still be in Florida or have made it to Georgia or South Carolina. For that matter, I have no idea where I’ll be tomorrow night either. How fun!

More about moving

04 Monday Jul 2016

Posted by wyndes in Boring, House, RV

≈ 12 Comments

This morning, while I was sitting out on my lanai, enjoying the early morning breeze (early-ish, it was maybe 7:30), I had a million ideas for blog posts. (<–hyperbole). Two hours later, sitting in my room, having done an assortment of organizational and internet-related tasks, all of those ideas are totally gone. What did I want to write about again? Oh, right, Serenity first.

I picked her up last Wednesday, YAY!, and when I wrote my blog post last Thursday, she was sitting in my driveway, feeling something like an overwhelming Christmas present, needing to be unwrapped but almost too scary to touch. So much to learn, so much to do, so much stuff to move in and organize and…

…that all became irrelevant Thursday evening, when in the midst of a torrential rainstorm, I discovered that it was also raining inside Serenity. I am trying to count this as fortunate in so many ways — it happened while I was here, still with a dry bed to sleep in. It happened in a big way. If the weather hadn’t been so extreme, it might have taken me weeks to realize that a few drips were a symptom of a serious problem. It happened before I’d moved much stuff into her, so she could go back to the dealer without inconveniencing me unduly. All good things. Of course, they’re sort of counter-balanced by the rather bad thing of it raining inside my future home, but hey, glass half-full. It could have been so much worse. I would have been very unhappy to learn that she leaked at 3AM when I was sleeping under the leak.

So, yeah, Serenity is back at the dealer and I’m really, really hoping to get her back sometime this week. Obviously, one of the dumb issues that I’m going to have to figure out how to deal with when my home needs repair is that she’s also my vehicle. I need to find a ride to get back to her, a ride to get home when I drop her off. It’s not so convenient.

In other things — my weekend felt bizarrely chaotic and overwhelming. The house is a mess and I’m still needing to get rid of more stuff. I’m definitely at the point where the decisions get harder and harder. I have approximately 50 shirts. This is too many shirts. In so many ways, this is too many shirts! But I’ve already said good-bye to all the ones that I didn’t really like, that didn’t really fit as well as I wanted them to or weren’t as flattering as I thought they’d be. I’ve also gotten rid of all the ones that I loved, but that were showing signs of their age. (Almost all of those, a couple are going to get worn until they’re literal shreds. I have a Lehigh University t-shirt that is probably fifty years old, maybe older, faded, with holes, and I still love it.) So, yeah, hard choices about stuff going on.

Also much trying to plan. The house closes three weeks from today. Where am I going to sleep that night? For that matter, where I am going to sleep the night before that? I will have needed to get the furniture out of the house before closing, because it’s not like I’m sticking it on a truck and moving it to the next place. But Serenity needs power to run the air-conditioner, and the guy who showed me around warned me that house power (i.e., not 30 amp) was not sufficient to run the AC. And in Florida, in July? I need the air-conditioner. I can run it on the generator, but probably shouldn’t all night. So the house closes in three weeks, but I need to be staying elsewhere before then, and elsewhere needs to be close enough that I can conveniently come to the closing. Decisions, decisions.

And yeah, somewhere along the way, I’d really like to get back to writing regularly. I’ve missed too many days in a row, because of the distractions of camper ownership, camper repair, and house chaos. But one day at a time, right?

Today’s goal: well, some words would be nice, but I need to get simpler than that. Email! I don’t know how many emails are stacked up in my inbox right now but far too many of them are real emails that deserved real replies. So today’s goal–clean out my inbox, do some more work on cleaning out my house, and remember to enjoy the moment that I’m in. Also, yoga. It’s been at least three or four days, which is too long to go for something that always makes me feel more settled and joyful.

Happy Fourth of July!

Productive Mondays

20 Monday Jun 2016

Posted by wyndes in House

≈ 2 Comments

When I woke up this morning and walked into the kitchen, I remembered that Past Me was kind of an asshole last night. I hadn’t cleaned the kitchen. My niece was visiting me for the weekend and my dad, step-mom and nephew came over for a Father’s Day dinner. It was a pretty low-key meal. We had flank steak, fruit salad, potato chips and dip, i.e. not a lot in the way of dishes to deal with. We even used paper plates, leftover from my house-painting party of a year ago. Anyway, I felt okay abandoning it after everyone left to spend some time on the internet.

Alas, my time on the internet stretched in that way that it does, and then I did a meditation class from yogadownload.com, and after the meditation — well, three quarters of the way through the meditation — I shut my laptop and went immediately to sleep. Thus, messy kitchen.

But when I saw it, after I rolled my eyes at myself and called Past Me some mean names, I promptly set about rectifying the situation. I threw away what needed to be thrown away, recycled what needed recycling, loaded up the dishwasher, washed some dishes, wiped down the counters, started my hot water for tea, and about ten minutes later, if not less, the kitchen was clean. Funnily enough, although I greatly prefer starting off my Monday mornings by walking into a clean kitchen, it was also strangely satisfying to start with an accomplishment. It made me feel like today is going to be a productive day.

It might also be a big day, emotionally speaking. The house is under contract. It had its inspection last Friday and the report is due to the buyer today. After he gets it, if he still wants the house and doesn’t ask me to do anything unreasonable… well, then I guess I’ve sold my house. Assuming all works out today, the closing is July 25th, five weeks from today. I wonder whether that day I will break my blog streak of actually posting every Monday morning? Maybe. Five weeks both feels like forever and no time. Fingers crossed that today goes well.

And may we all have productive Mondays!

Selling my house (or not, as the case may be)

19 Thursday May 2016

Posted by wyndes in Grace, House

≈ 4 Comments

The second people to look at my house made an offer.

I said no.

This house-selling business is an interesting process. I had imagined it as straightforward: standard contracts, typical mortgages, generally accepted terms. Not so much, apparently. Or at any rate, my two offers were very different. The first seemed straightforward. The second, not so much. The number of things without prices that the seller (i.e., me) was going to pay for was… well, almost laughable. No, I’m not going to pay for all these pigs-in-a-poke. WDO inspection and underwriting and tax services and closing costs and on and on. I do expect that I’ll be paying some of a buyer’s closing costs, but I’m not going to sign a contract that doesn’t come with clear prices attached. Apparently people do, however.

This offer was, in every possible way, worse than the first, so eh. Nope, not going to do that yet. Oh, well. Maybe I’m not selling my house. Or maybe the third people to look at the house or the eighth or the tenth or some other number will be the offer to work out. Meanwhile, I will enjoy living in it.

In other news… I’ve got nothing. I’ve been spending a lot of time looking up random words and thinking about definitions. Well, not exactly random. One link leads to another which leads to another, but the starting word was “grace.” What does her name really mean? A Gift of Grace started with the idea that on the surface, he rescues her (back in my original plot) but really she rescues him. In the new plot, as it has evolved, there is no rescuing. So what’s the gift? Before I could answer that question, I got wound up with words and the way we use them. Salvation, surrender, blessings, alleluia — it’s made for some fascinating reading. None of it useful for writing Grace, ha, but still interesting.

I do think that maybe I got a glimmer of an idea last night from a writing group that I go to. I brought up my struggle and what I currently think my issue is and one of the guys said (about Noah), “so his perspective needs to change.” I’m not entirely sure where I’m going with that idea, but it might help. I hope so anyway! Meanwhile, I continue meandering around in the same chapters, but I think they’re evolving in good ways.

And back to it!

Houses and quilts and other stuff

16 Monday May 2016

Posted by wyndes in House, Personal, Randomness

≈ 7 Comments

The first people to look at my house made an offer.

I accepted.

And then their financing fell through.

It was what you might call a whirlwind of emotions. I’m not fussing about it, but it inspired me to live in my house very mindfully this weekend, enjoying the pool, appreciating the lanai*, and taking full advantage of the laundry room.

I’ve determined that I’m going to leave this house with all quilts and blankets as clean as possible: I’m not thinking about the fact that an RV doesn’t have a ton of room for blankets and so I should be probably be deciding which ones need to get donated. I own a lot of quilts. Maybe I’ll do a post of quilt pictures and let you help me decide? But mostly my choices will be between presentable vs extraordinarily well-worn and ragged, but incredibly nostalgic. For example, I own a quilt my mom made with her grandma for her wedding. It’s purple and red, ripped along one side, very lightweight, and more than fifty years old. Put that up against the perfectly serviceable blue and green quilt I picked up at Bed, Bath & Beyond a few years ago and there’s a practical decision and the decision that I will undoubtedly make. But I sort of suspect that I’ll be keeping all the quilts when I leave and making the hard decisions only when I am forced to it by the lack of space in my future new home.

And who knows when that will be? After my first showing turned into my first offer, I thought this process would be quick, but no one else has even looked at the place yet, so maybe not so much. That’s probably fortunate because I have a lot to do before I leave. (Ahem, like, write a book? Yeah, that.) I’m not stressing, though. A time for everything and everything in its time. And now it’s time to write!

*Lanai: So it turns out, in Florida, there are specific terms for those outside spaces adjacent to one’s house. They’re not all just patios. My outside space has no walls but is covered, so apparently it’s a lanai. If it weren’t covered but was paved, it would be a patio. If it was made of wood, not covered, it would be a deck. If it… well, follow the link on the term to read all the variations. But I may have to go through all my Tassamara books looking at the porches. Apparently the Southerners might have called them verandas. I figure I’m fine in Akira’s point-of-view, because she — like me — probably had no idea of these fine distinctions, but I suspect Natalya should have. Not that I’m going to make any changes, it would just be interesting to know where I got it wrong.

Showing the house

12 Thursday May 2016

Posted by wyndes in House

≈ 3 Comments

In twenty minutes, I’m putting the leashes on the dogs and taking them for a walk in what I hope is not the rain, so that some total stranger can wander through my house, considering whether they’d like to live in it. Such a weird feeling! Wistful and worried, anxious and yet, curiously relaxed. I love my house and it’s okay with me if these people do, too, and it’s okay with me if they don’t.

This is my first house, probably my last, although one never knows what the future will bring. (In my case, unless it brings me a partner who wants to do yard work, this is my last house.) My bucket list from over fifteen years ago — found while sorting stuff — included “live in a place that feels like home” and I do. One checkmark.

It will be so strange to leave it. And yet, adventure awaits. I need to figure out a way to record names of campgrounds, names of places to visit. I’m following all these fun RV blogs in my RSS feed now and it feels like there’s so much to see. I keep reminding myself that really what I plan to do is find a nice place to sit for a while, then sit and write, then find another nice place to sit. This adventure is supposed to include many, many words.

First, though, I need to finish Grace. I wonder if I can squeeze in another 100 words before time for my walk? I should try. Or maybe I should wander my house, eying the floors critically and seeing if there’s one more spot I can scrub, one more pile of Bartleby fur hiding in the corners.

To-do lists

02 Monday May 2016

Posted by wyndes in Bartleby, House, Swimming, Zelda

≈ 4 Comments

I looked at my to-do list and with the exception of one ridiculous item — finish writing this damn book — it is very close to being completed. Most of the items on it are either things that I am waiting on someone else to do or things that are optional. For example, wash all the windows. Well, that’s a nice idea, because clean windows look good. But if I don’t get around to washing all the windows and someone doesn’t buy the house because the windows weren’t clean, they probably weren’t someone who needed a thirty-year old house anyway.

Yesterday’s chores included buying six bags of mulch and spreading it on my front garden; organizing books and items in the garage and taking a load of books to the library donation spot; going to Lowe’s and buying lightbulbs for the overhead kitchen lights, then dragging out the big ladder to change the two that were burned out; scrubbing my bathtub to within an inch of its life (it’s still doesn’t look spotless, but it never will); and much playing and splashing with the dogs.

The last part was fun. It was a beautiful first day of May and the water was perfect. B, I think, finally really likes swimming as long as I’m close to him. He’s like a toddler in the water, running around all excited on the edge, then super-cautious about how he puts his paws in, then always checking back to make sure he hasn’t gotten too far away from safety. And Z, of course, loves the pool and playing with her basketball.

2016-04-26 13.06.13

It definitely gave me pangs about giving it up. I had the gloomy thought of “I will never find another house that I love as much as this one.” French doors to the patio, high ceilings, my window seat, my kitchen cabinets… and then I thought, yes, this is true, I will never again have to be responsible for yard work or worry about termites. Leaks I will have to worry about — apparently, water is the big problem for RVs and getting a leak is both eventually inevitable and the problem that you have to watch out for. Yes, I’ve been doing lots of reading about RVs.

Today’s goals: finish the damn book. But that brings me back to my original thoughts on writing — that goal never moves, because I’ve made it too overwhelming. I need to make it a series of smaller goals. So today’s goal: finish the scene I’m in, write the next one, figure out what happens in the one after that. And, at least temporarily, let go of worrying about the house and the RV and the future and all the things that are driving me away from the story, and concentrate on Grace.

Ironically, I thought my trip to Sarasota on Friday would be really great plotting time to finalize the order of these last scenes and maybe get some real words imagined but I spent most of it daydreaming about Fen. She’s having such great adventures in my head. I seriously am so looking forward to getting back to writing about her. First, though, Grace. And even before that, a Monday morning, a dog walk, some healthy breakfast, and so on. The fingers are warmed up and ready to go!

Jasmine, maybe

11 Monday Apr 2016

Posted by wyndes in House, Yoga

≈ 8 Comments

The tree outside my bedroom window is in full bloom. I have no idea what it is, but it has deep green leaves and little white blooms and I imagine that it’s jasmine, even though I’ve never heard of a jasmine tree. But it smells incredible and I’ve never been able to find a description of another white flowering tree that seems to match.

2016-04-11 08.50.29

I ate outside this morning, watching the bees start to buzz around the tree, admiring the bright flowers on the (evil) bougainvillea, listening to the birds, and thought, “Am I crazy? How can I let this go?” But it only took me a second to remind myself that the tree doesn’t bloom year-round, that the patio needs pressure-watching to get rid of the mold, that the pool should really be re-surfaced sometime soon, even though my new (expensive) variable-speed pool pump is doing an awesome job, and that I’m guaranteed the occasional beautiful morning in a life on the road, even if many of them wind-up being views of concrete pads and other RVs. It was reassuring.

In other news, my neighborhood is having a community garage sale on April 23rd. Ha. Or argh. I’m not sure which, really. Maybe both. Since the garage is still mostly set up for a sale, I might finish sorting the rest of the house and put stuff out for that sale. It should be a lot easier: no ads, no signs, and a semi-guaranteed customer base. But it will still be well before the time I intend to put the house on the market, so I don’t want to get rid of everything — I don’t want to be living in an empty house for months while I wait for it to sell. Can you imagine how depressing that would be? Ugh. But there’s plenty of kitchen stuff that I didn’t manage to get out and I might see if I can brave the emotional cost of the china again. And the chaos of the house is slowly but surely settling into something I can live with. Two rooms are neat and orderly, three more are only semi-chaotic, and the remaining two — my bedroom and the kitchen — are still in complete disarray, but with potential to be straightened up and acceptable sometime soon.

In yoga today, L, the yoga instructor, read a beautiful piece about non-attachment to objects. So fitting. I tried to find it online so I could post it, but she told me to google “yamas” and there’s so much info out there that I cannot find the right poem. Or prayer. Maybe it was both. Either way, it was perfectly timed.

But speaking of timing, somehow it has gotten late. Today is the start of a new writing chain, so I’d best get moving!

Garage sale highlights

10 Sunday Apr 2016

Posted by wyndes in House, Personal, Restaurants

≈ 4 Comments

I’m so glad my writing chain wasn’t very long, because there was no way I was writing yesterday. After several days of prepping for the garage sale and two days of having the garage sale, my brain was fried. The garage sale was… wow, so much crazier than I envisioned. I could not possibly have managed without the help from my dad and stepmother and C on Friday and then my friend E and R on Saturday. (R gave me the nicest birthday surprise ever and showed up in Orlando on Friday night. More on that in a bit.)

On Friday, it was impossible to walk in the garage because there was so much stuff in it. I was still trying to price things and get them out on the driveway with people crowding into the narrow corridors between tables and bins and boxes. People were lining up to ask me questions and my dad and C were selling stuff right and left.

The Legos sold in the first ten minutes, as did some Pokemon toys. Other stuff — honestly, I don’t even know. Things went. Not everything and definitely not some of the stuff that I expected to go. I guess the day of Thomas the Tank Engine is over, because that was still there end of the day Saturday. The Playmobil collectors did not show up in force, because I still have plenty of Playmobil and it was really priced very reasonably, IMO. I could definitely have done much better on eBay. A couple of the paintings or prints sold, and a couple of the frames, but there were lots of others of those left, more than I expected. I had a ton of frames, but I guess I’m the only person who buys too many picture frames, and I wasn’t my own customer! But enough stuff sold that it was definitely worth the effort for me.

Highlights: I had a big bin of Bionicles priced as a whole for $50. I’d intended to put out Ziplock bags next to it and also offer a piecemeal price, but I hadn’t gotten around to it. A small boy carrying a gallon-sized Ziplock bag with a dollar bill and some change at the bottom came up with his dad and his dad asked about the Bionicles. He started the explanation that the boy was interested but only had… but I cut him off and said to the boy, “How about if you give me all the money that’s in your bag and you fill your bag with Bionicles?” His eyes went wide and I added, “And you don’t have to close the bag, you can let it overflow.” He looked at the Bionicles and he looked at his money and he looked back at the Bionicles and he was so torn. His face screwed up in concentration. He stared at the Bionicles. He bit his lip. He thought hard. Then his dad leaned over to him and said, “That’s a very good deal,” and the boy burst out, with a fist pump of joy, “Yes! I will do it!” So, so, so cute.

On day 2, an older guy was interested in something. I truly cannot remember what. But I offered it to him for $2. Maybe it was a lantern that I’d had marked for $10? I honestly can’t remember what it was. He took it, saying “All right, that’s too good a deal to resist.” Then he asked about DVDs. I still had a few left so I pointed them out. He was, however, specifically interested in chick flicks. He told me that his girlfriend required him to show up with a chick flick on Saturday nights. I said, hmm, maybe inside, if you want one without a case. He said, yeah, he didn’t need a case. So I went inside and grabbed a DVD holder and brought it back out. Flipping through it, passing the kid movies, Harry Potter, The Future is Wild, I found My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Offered him that, asked how many he was looking for, kept flipping through, found Pride and Prejudice, the 2005 version. Promised him that this was absolutely a chick flick and that his girlfriend would love it, guaranteed. He was laughing at me, but said, okay, yes, he’d take those two movies, how much. I said, hmm, a quarter each. He said, “You are really terrible at this,” and insisted on paying me $1 each. So sweet. I hope his girlfriend loved the movies.

Later in the day, a dad and his son. I’m going to call the son maybe 12. He was pretty tall, but he still looked young. They browsed, the dad picked out some books including the Rick Riordan series and some DVDs, including Eureka’s first season. Obviously a person with excellent taste! The son was looking at a box of old computer games — Zoo Tycoon, Spore, that sort of thing. Maybe eight or ten games in the box, but old computer games require old computers. And to the best of my knowledge, no one else had even looked at the box. They’d checked out everything, drifting around, talking together, looking almost ready to leave, and the son went back to the games. He looked at them, looked at his dad, and the dad prompted him a little, with an encouraging nod. So the boy said, “How much are the games?”

“All of them?” I asked. He nodded. I tipped my head to the side and said, “What is the number that will make you go home thinking, ‘YES! I got such a deal!?'”

He said, “Um…I don’t know.”

I said, “How about three dollars?”

His eyes went wide and then he frowned a little and looked back at the box and said doubtfully, “Each?”

I said, “No, no, of course not, for the whole box.”

That was obviously a right number because his grin was huge. He looked at his dad and his dad nodded. When I went to total him up, I counted the DVDs as $1 and it turned out that R had said .50 for them (which was how I was pricing CDs) which was fine by me, but the dad insisted on paying the $1 price for them, because of the deal on the computer games. And both of them said thank you beautifully. I’m not sure how they wound up at my garage sale — I’m guessing weekend dad, but I could be wrong — but I’m so glad to think those books and DVDs and games are in a home where they will be appreciated.

Speaking of appreciated, on Friday, a woman was interested in some of my great-grandmother’s china, but she wanted–or needed–to haggle. She thought her daughter, into “vintage”, would love the dishes for her quincianara, but she couldn’t spend too much. Now, putting the china out was one of the hardest decisions to make and it mostly wound up being too hard to do. I only put out the serving platters and bowls and some tea cups and saucers, none of which I’ve ever used. My life, even now, does not offer opportunities to use three different sets of formal china, much less tea cups. The rest of it — I just couldn’t let go of it. When the house sells and I have no choice, it will get easier, I hope. Anyway, maybe the woman was just a really good negotiator, but I wound up giving her the cups, the saucers, two platters and two bowls for $14, which was literally all the money she had in her wallet. It was hard. Watching her walk away, I definitely felt pangs. But the idea that a fifteen-year-old girl is going to be thrilled — and her mother promised me that she would be — was comforting and infinitely nicer than dropping the china off in the thrift store box.

Speaking of thrift stores, at about 1PM on Saturday, it was getting hot and I was tired and we hadn’t seen any people at all for a while, I was mentally debating whether I wanted to have another garage sale in a month or so or whether I was ready to be done with the whole thing. It’s a lot of work. And day one, when there was a lot of stuff, was terrific — the money definitely made it worth it. But day two had been very slow, more about getting rid of stuff than making money. There was plenty of stuff left — tons of books, some kitchen things, some knick knacks, Christmas stuff, some toys, frames, art — but not good stuff, not the kind that makes people squeeze into an overcrowded garage.

Finally, I decided. We’d take it to the thrift store. Goodwill has a drop-off spot. We’d load it up into bins and then into the car. It would take a while. There was enough stuff that it could be three or four trips, maybe more with all the books. But my house is a complete and utter chaotic mess and another garage sale would be a lot of work again, for probably not a lot of money since so much had already sold, and I’ve got plenty to do without that. So E and I started piling stuff into bins, carefully and patiently.

A car arrived and a couple women got out. The one asked me about a lantern and I told her she could have it for a dollar. The other started looking into one of the bins that E and I had been packing. I told her that she could have anything in it for free, since we’d been getting ready to go to the thrift store. And then I looked around at all of the stuff that was left and thought, you know, whatever, we’re about to take it all to the thrift store, and offered her almost anything for free.

I made one section of one table not free and put the stuff there that I didn’t want to give away — the Playmobil, a couple prints, some things that E had been interested in, the china that was left, the crate of Bionicles — but apart from that, I waved my arm and said, “Take what you like.” Ironically, three more cars then drove up, and it turned into a whirlwind of people grabbing stuff, but the first two women, they got most of it. When they drove away, their car was stuffed to the ceiling, their laps piled high with clothes and knickknacks and kitchen things. One even stuck the box of lightbulbs that I’d had in the garage (not intending them for sale) and a box of ziplock bags on top of her pile. I let the lightbulbs go but retrieved the bags.

I think the other three cars had fun. A nice young woman picked out a bag of books. An older couple took a pet carrier and were delighted. The third car took some stuff, I’m not sure what. But the first women, they were wildfire, clearing the place out, taking everything they could as quickly as they could, and then having to make choices about what they could fit in their car. If they’d had more room, I bet they would have tried to take everything. Before they left, though, the older woman, walking by me, not looking at me, her eyes straight ahead, said, almost under her breath, so quiet that I could barely hear her, “God bless you.” I got goose bumps. I felt so, so, so blessed. So fortunate, so grateful, so lucky. To have so much that I can give it away and to have given it away to someone who found it a blessing. I’m just… it was a beautiful note on which to end the day.

And along the way, someone slipped a Cybis figurine onto the table of stuff that I was keeping. I don’t know how it wound up there. I kept some of my mom’s Cybis in the box of things that I’m going to store at my brother’s house — a madonna, a unicorn — but I’d run out of room and so let some of it go. Apparently at least one of the people at the garage sale at the end of the day didn’t want me giving that one away for free. The figure is a little girl, holding a doll. It’s named ‘Wendy’. I suspect maybe it meant more to my mom than it meant to me. And under the circumstances, I will be making room for it in my box somehow.

I will have a few trips to the thrift store in my future, or maybe to the library. I still have boxes and boxes of books left, no surprise. But I didn’t spend yesterday afternoon running back and forth. Or, for that matter, cleaning my house. Instead, I relaxed and then took R out to an absolutely fabulous dinner at a place called The Ravenous Pig. It was amazing. Best meal I’ve eaten in years, I think. The salmon appetizer (described as “King Salmon, lardo cured, fava bean panisse, plum sauce, grilled ramp”) was insanely delicious. R and I were both practically whimpering as we ate.

I had the pork porterhouse and possibly one of the highlights of a day already filled with highlights was when R, eating the part of my pork that I couldn’t finish, said, “You know, I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but although this pork is better than your pork chops, it’s only better by such a tiny, tiny amount that it’s probably not worth the price to me. My steak, though, was the best steak I’d ever tasted. Not meaning to insult your pork chops.” I did not feel insulted. On the contrary, I was very pleased to have my pork chops compared to those of a seriously fantastic restaurant with a professional and very creative chef. The salmon appetizer, though… yeah, it was incredible.

After dinner, R and I stayed up past midnight watching X-Men movies together. There was one neither of us had ever seen and at the end of it, we questioned whether it would have been a better movie in the movie theater or whether the X-Men movie that came after it, which we had both seen, was really just a much better movie. So we watched the next movie to find out — it was a much better movie, and very fun to watch again. I should look up the names, but I feel like I’ve been writing this post forever. But it was so lovely to hang out with him and talk movies and story structure together.

World’s longest blog post! And I should probably have been writing a book or working on smoothing out the chaos of my house, which looks like a tornado spun through it. But there was so much I wanted to remember. My birthday weekend was truly the nicest birthday I’ve had in years. I’m feeling very lucky, very happy, only a little stressed by the chaos of my home (although so grateful the painters aren’t coming tomorrow) and only a little anxious about where my life is going. Life is good.

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Just catching the sunrise
A little patch of flowers in the wasteland.
Spring is on its way. Yay!
The second rainbow on the right is a little hard to see in the photo so look close.
Pre-Epcot breakfast, made by Frisbee. Total SuperHost. All the stars!

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