I got to see Mel and Kris! At Kings Mountain Art Fair today.

I totally lucked out: I found a parking space right across the street from where the shuttle picks up and drops off for the outer-darkness cars. Couldn’t ask for better.

Got there and they offered me a seat, come sit awhile. We tried to remember just how far back we go; our kids were a lot younger and so were we. We swapped stories and laughed while I tried to stay out of the way of interactions with other customers. I related having recently had dinner guests where each had two of Mel and Kris’s little rice bowls: sour cream in this one, brown sugar in the other one, a big bowl full of strawberries each: dip, dip, eat.

I needed more of those little bowls, then, and while I’m at it I broke one of the bigger ones this past year and it was a favorite. Fortunately they had just fired a run that looked very much like it–I bought two.

At last it was time to note the height of the sun and be on my way.

Mel insisted on carrying my bag not only to the waiting area for the bus that is a former trolley car, he boarded it with me and took my new pottery all the way to my car. Thankfully he got back on in time to ride it right back to Kris, it being one of the busier times of day for them.

I went home and halved Ghirardelli chocolate raspberry squares to make spikes on a cake dragon…

At the block party, we got the great surprise that a mom and her daughters were there (but not her son) who had grown up friends with our kids. I hadn’t seen any of them since their middle-school days and now the parents live right around the corner.  We had about sixteen years’–how did that happen!–worth of catching up to do between us all.

The daughter remembered that I was always knitting while waiting to pick up my kids back at the elementary school; did I still do that? The mom asked if I still did the, did the, (and she motioned a spinning wheel turning).

Oh yes!

They said that with all the unpacking going on they almost hadn’t made it and they were so glad they’d just dropped everything and come. Me too, oh, me too.