The window over the kitchen sink, with the Sacred and Immaculate Hearts, some holy water in a bottle from Walsingham, Tiny Dora, and a snail from somewhere in Europe.
Waiting for my coffee to make. Then it'll be time to dress for Mass and the bridal shower after, and take the dog for a trot around the park loop. It's another soft day, but a little warmer, with a high near 80F and more sun, it looks like, than we had yesterday.
Hard to believe we've got only ten more days in this most beautiful month, and then it'll be summer. It feels strange not to be preparing to go to the beach, as we've done every year for the last twelve years (except 2020), but my husband has some plans afoot, I think. They are a bit last-minute, and my fear is that everything we want to do will be all booked up, so it's not a go yet . . . but he was talking about it last night, and is evidently laying plans.
This situation, happy as it is, illustrates one titanic difference between the two of us: how we approach the last minute. If I am going to do a thing at all --- and this is a big IF, frankly --- then I'm going to do it ages in advance. Let too much time go by, and I will assume that it's too late, and the thing cannot be done. My husband, on the other hand, positively thrives on the last minute. It's when he does anything, and not one minute before. The zone when I think it's going to be either hopelessly rude or just hopeless --- to arrange a dogsitter, for example, RSVP to an invitation, or make a hotel reservation --- that zone is where he shines. This means that we wind up doing a lot of things that I think we're not going to do. It means that we wind up doing a lot of things that it hasn't even entered my head to do until I find myself doing them. It means that we wind up doing a lot of things that, even as we're doing them, I'm sure are going to turn out to be impossible, or a disaster. In a movie this whole dynamic would be fun and enchanting. In real life, it can be kind of wearing. On the other hand, it generally transpires that it's better to do the thing than not to do the thing, which is to say that while I never fail to hate to admit it, he generally ends up being right.
So we may or may not be taking this trip which kind of scares me to think about because it's a big thing and more money than we've spent on travel since before we moved to England in 1999. Of course, for various reasons, we're finally in a better place financially than we've been since pretty much 1999, although my brain doesn't want to acknowledge that. We're also in a place where just the two of us can do something: also a strange place to be, but not unpleasant. Given that my two youngest children just spent five months hoofing around the world, I'm not actually going to feel guilty leaving them to mind the house and the dog for a couple of weeks. Otherwise, my husband would have proposed this idea, and I would have said we couldn't possibly, how could we leave them, how could we deny them an experience, etc. etc. etc. That argument, at least, evaporates now almost before it forms in my mind. They have been having way more fun than any of the rest of us, for months on end.
So IF this thing happens, it'll happen in the second half of June. We have to be back in time for Mo's wedding on July 1. That gives me plenty of time to be over the jetlag before I go to Houston in the middle of July. Then it'll be August and back to school, and the summer will be over, and I'll be going on about how I feel that it ought to be sweater weather when it's 95 degrees, because that's the way the year's wheel turns.
But today is today. Here is what I'm wearing for it:
I might lose the blue merino cardi by midday, but then again, I might not. We'll see how cool 100% merino actually is. Wearing it over my lovely new Maggie T-for-teal, the world's easiest dress. If we really do go a-traveling, this dress will definitely feature in my travel capsule. Long vintage necklace layered over my Miraculous Medal, and Xero Jessie sandals for a light contrast with my lowest hem.
Feeling, again, like many bucks. I washed my hair last night, slept on it damp, and this morning have emulsified some gel and water in my hands and smoothed and scrunched it over my hair. That needs to dry and the crunch needs to get combed out, but otherwise I am, as they say, good to go.
MUCH MUCH LATER: