April 20th 2:40pm
It is raining. The girls huddle under the overhanging eves of the window and back door, respectively, and whine softly. They don’t understand why they can’t come in. The concrete is speckled with the marks of fat, splattered raindrops and I hear them battering away though the chimney of the fireplace.
Faint from the garage comes another sound of battering, that of Keith building himself shelves. Other than that, there is just the hum of the refrigerator that arrived yesterday and the perpetual moaning of traffic beyond the woods.
It’s the lull before the storm; it’s almost like home. We went jogging together this morning and were dismayed to see two large groups of middle or high school students waiting on the curb as we came down the steeply sloping hill that our house is built on.
“Why aren’t they in school yet?” groused Keith.
It’s no easy thing to go power walking, and then jogging, before the collective eyes of Youth, so fashionably appareled, so insular a group. We managed, though, and broke into a long, easy jog, like horses in harness, neck and neck, elbows swinging, heads up.
Shortly thereafter I was gasping for breath. I’m going to have to build myself back up and I’m going to have to get out the door by seven am. It gets as hot as one hundred and thirty degrees down here, or so I’ve heard. Right now it’s only in the high eighties. Yes, that’s right. High eighties, and humid with it.
Keith mowed the lawn and I swept the concrete and then we left, to explore post. Keith is about eighteen miles from where he works, which is a little further than before, but not out of the question, certainly.
The PX is massive, and busy. And we were there on a Wednesday, at twelve thirty. What must it be like on a Saturday, after pay day? We will never know; we will never be that fool hardy.
On the way home, we stopped at a Good Will store, so I could buy some books. I had two dollars, I figured I could get three paperbacks, at least. But no. Paperback books there sold for a dollar fifty each. I remember the days when they were twenty five cents. What is the world coming to? It’s a sad thing, my friends, when used paperbacks are hit that hard by inflation.
So, to economize, I got a massive novel that is actually three novels in one, by an author who turns out to have won a Nobel prize for literature, so I did pretty well for my money. It’s very entertaining, besides.
