Falling Apart Meat Loaf and Nicknames of Old Friday Round-Up

My brother called me Red. He also called me Short Pants. He was nine years older and looked out for me a lot so when he called me Red, it felt like a blanket wrapped around my shoulders. No one else ever called me Red. My husband calls me JJ or Jannie which I like an awful lot. But I wish the nickname Red had stuck. I wish it hadn’t died with my brother.

My liberation this week is that I’m wearing a skort from L.L. Bean. I posted about my skort on Threads yesterday and had 4.5 thousand likes and a zillion comments from women who right away understood my having overcome my own mindset that old women shouldn’t wear short skirts. I loved women’s comments about how they’d freed themselves from people’s expectations about what old women should and shouldn’t wear. I love this skort so much. It feels like the days when I’d walk around in a bathing suit, like any minute I could jump in the lake and swim to the raft. Freeing.

My five days camping brought out my feral side. Back in civilization, I yelled at people in a meeting today. Admittedly, it was a situation requiring the restoration of order which I could only do by raising my voice or throwing a gavel at someone, but still. I am, if nothing else, an adherent of decorum. Today, with bites from various bugs pocking my feet and arms, I was still the person washing my face with a handful of water from the old, iced tea jug in our van and brushing my teeth and spitting into a bush (is this far enough away to deflect the bears?). I love the no-nonsense side of life, but it isn’t appropriate in all settings.

A few days ago, we went to the International Wolf Center. This was in very northern Minnesota and, as happens many times, we traveled on a lonely road to get there only to find the parking lot packed with cars. How does that happen? The wolves – the stuffed ones and live ones – all reminded me of Swirl to the point that I wanted to kiss some of the pictures on the wall. There were wolf pups and three mature wolves. Any one of them could have been Swirl. The faces, the long snouts, the eyes rimmed in black, the certitude of being. I loved my dog, but he is gone. I’m getting over it. It might not sound that way, but I am.

My grandson asked for meat loaf. He and his partner watered our plants while we were camping. So, we are going to pay them and make them dinner. “I want meat loaf,” he said, which is interesting because I don’t remember my meat loaf being so show-stopping but it’s not the first time that someone who passed through my house at one time or another asked for meat loaf. I’d always thrown it together, haphazard like, and it fell apart on the plate, and then I found an actual recipe and it stuck together in a way that made for clean slices. Tidy but not as popular. Haphazard it is. So fitting.