Not Yet Pickled

While the cashier watched, my husband and I debated about how many pickles there were at home. “There’s that big jar in the cupboard,” he said. “Those are meal prep pickles,” I answered, distinguishing the high end, hand-packed, pickles I was about to buy from the ones I’d put in meals for homeless people. My sainthood took another hit.

I washed my car today and spray-waxed it. My car is old – 2005 – but still quite beautiful until you look closely at the tiny bubbles popping up and there is deep corrosion of the wheel covers which is depressing. But the Thunderbird emblem is unblemished and the car in motion is sleek. A man in a gas station once came over to me and said, “When you drove in, it was like a shark swimming up to the pumps.”

My friend came to a meeting yesterday with an old tin tub packed with small sunflowers, mint, tomatoes, and chives, all grown or found by her and brought for the rest of us to take home. She does this often and it smooths the edges of our intense political discussions. She also wears plaid button shirts.

This week we learned about coat blow. This is when a double-coated dog, northern dogs like our Alaskan Husky Swirl, shed rivers of hair, usually once or twice a year. It’s astonishing. For a while I thought he had a terrible disease but, no, he is blowing his coat. I love that term – blowing his coat – it is so ridiculously, perfectly feral.

We bought a raffle ticket from the Iditarod Trail Committee. The big prize is a Dodge Ram truck. The odds are 1 in 1,000 which are not bad odds particularly since we are the only two-time winners of the Milwaukee Brewers 50/50 raffle. So we have already constructed a scenario in our heads wherein we would have to drop everything once we are announced as winners on September 2nd and fly to Anchorage to claim our new truck and drive it home from Alaska through the Yukon Territory. It will probably already be snowing.