Husks

This afternoon, my old friend Karen and I sat talking and laughing in a small sea of people, some of whom wondered what we found so funny in a little one-year-old girl’s birthday party, but there was plenty, like me telling her how I swam in Lake Superior in my clothes a few weeks ago and how that made me remember the time we were bike riding past Lake Michigan, ditched our bikes in the sand like two nine-year- old kids, and ran into the lake because it was hot, very hot, but when we came out we were sodden and sandy, the loveliness of having swum in our jeans evaporated except for the memory, and then we laughed about the time we picked through a farmer’s pumpkin farm in our suits and heels gathering pumpkins to decorate a rich man’s house for a fundraiser for an orphanage in Nicaragua, the best pumpkins having already been taken, leaving us the flawed and rotting ones, though we made the best of it and raised a little money, and last we talked about protein and roughage and how corn is better roughage than spinach, a comment followed at the end of the party by Karen scooping leftovers from the veggie tray into a plastic bag while I blocked the other guests’ view since it might have had the appearance of scrounging though it was actually helpfulness, too many leftovers can be so burdensome, but regrettably, in light of what we now know, there was no corn.

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Photo by Virgil Cayasa on Unsplash