Let's pretend in These titles mean nothing.

We meet on the sidewalk. It’s a warm day so we can stand and talk. We probably won’t have much to say. We greet each other. One of us remembers the other’s name. Probably you remember mine. I’m awful with names. It’s nothing new. I’ve always been that way.

One of us asks the other how we’ve been. Or one of us wonders whether to bring up the fact that the other has had a loss in life since we last talked - a spouse, a child, a job, a favorite piece of real estate.

We’d promise to see each other again. Stop by for coffee. Have a gossip. Have a heart to heart. I’ll bring freshly baked cookies. You’ll show me pictures from your last trip.

In the back of our minds, we are thinking who we’ll tell about this meeting. We’re thinking how it’s like that one Updike story when his wife meets his old red-haired all the way down lover.

We’re grateful we’re glad to see each other. Glad the world is treating us each as well as it is. We’re glad our coats still button, glad we remember where we parked our cars, glad life is as good as it is.

🥳

I never use the little smiley faces. Once in a while they show up when I hit the wrong key and I just dismiss them with a wave of my flicky little mind. But this time I gave you one. I think it might be a clown. I didn’t try to look for an appropriate one. Now I wish I knew how to get them back on purpose. I could copy the one I put there over again but that would defeat all our purposes.

Meanwhile -

It’e been ages since I wrote. I have a jillion things to say. Today is cloudy. I suppose the temperature is above freezing and the soft snow is evaporating into the air. I heard on the radio today that somewhere - maybe the whole earth- is dryer than it’s been in a lot of years - a thousand? Is that possible? I hope now. We have a bunch of generous snow. So that has water in it. The crops after what seemed like a dry summer were moderately good. It turned out to be a normal year.

One of the four kids who spent so much time at my house - one of the two that weren’t mine - died recently. His mother called and told me. Life has these things that shouldn’t happen. Another neighbor died = an old man who’d had a good life. Jim brought home his funeral card for me to staple into my 2024 notebook.

I wish I had some pictures to show you. I suppose I have more of the barn. The barn has to be one of the most uninteresting things on the internet and perhaps in real life. I think I took a picture of my new Martha Washington pig cookie jar. It should be in my camera but not in my computer. Maybe soon.

I’m spending time with Trump and Harry and Meghan. I wouldn’t call them good company, or even reliable entertainment, but they’re always here and they don’t ask much from me. Not that you guys ask much from me either. I’ll have to think about our relationships and what color hair we all have. I’ll have to think about our meetings on the sidewalk.

Bless you all.