A long talk at night made up for leaving early in the morning so I could spend a full Monday with my sister.
We did some yardwork and I performed some camel duties by carrying bags of mulch thither and yon. I think I should give her a wheelbarrow. Her various gardens look great, all full of flowers, even cuttable ones. We shopped so I could be the one to tote the 50-pound sack of birdseed (she still doesn't like birds but the feeder is for Kitty's amusement, of course).
In the dingy, scary, throwback store (Ocean State Job Lot, not that we were in Rhode Island), she pointed out a thing I haven't seen for nigh on 30 years but that nonetheless immediately made my entire skin tense. I might even have turned my head away as I closed my eyes to scurry past, and I know I didn't go back later and look at the product more carefully. My sister told me it took tremendous ovaries to invite Ken to prom after not seeing him for three years, and maybe it did, which means I was braver at 16 than I am at 38. What she pointed out was a basket of sticks of cocoa butter.
The summer before third grade, I jumped into a pool backward off its deck, but not far enough backward, and I slammed my chin into the edge with a noise my father remembers sounding like a rifle shot. I got three stitches that day, and to keep the laceration supple and facilitate healing, I was given--is this how backward 1976 was?--a stick of cocoa butter. Not a lotion, not an oil, but a solid less spreadable than butter, Play-Doh, or putty. To apply, by rubbing, onto a wound that had taken stitches to close. I had nightmares for months about an ogre who would turn me upside down and apply salt and pepper to the site and eat the contents of my skull from chin to crown.
Anyhow, that's how backward this store was, that it still stocked that. But I bought from it a nail buffer, because I admit with shame that I like how the manicure looks.
We had lunch at Norwich Marina, right against the water, and that was pretty. Norwich does have potential, having been poor long enough that not much was built in the soulless modern style. It has great fin-de-siècle brick commercial buildings, and Colonial, Federal, Victorian, and Craftsman houses, and not a few that look like the Four-Story Mistake.
At lunch CLH told me about a movie she'd recently seen called "In Her Shoes," a chick flick for sisters, and when we got home it was on so we watched it and got all teary together. That's so fun. In the evening there were brownies and ice cream for dinner, and she slept on the couch and I on the floor (with Benedict Kitty further deserving her name by sleeping with me instead of with her mother) until an alarm rang at 3:30.
Thus ended a lovely little getaway vacation, with a 6 a.m. flight.
I got to work shortly after noon by airport bus most of the way and taxi the last little bit, found almost everyone left for the meeting, and just the one task I'd come in to do yet to be done. I was done by 2 and ÜberBoss, who agrees that sleeping on planes doesn't really count, let me go. I have the best bosses.