Yesterday my husband and Karen and I drove hither and yon: Sugarloaf Mountain, Cunningham Falls, Catoctin Mountain Orchard (where we did indeed buy apples, and some of the biggest I have ever had) up near the Pennsylvania border, dropped by briefly to say hi to Kathleen, and called Bev: we’d forgotten to sign each other’s books. Hey! Great excuse! So we drove up north of Baltimore and took her out to dinner, where I found she’d had the same reaction I’d had to finding out we’d forgotten to: that we would get to see each other again while I was still out here. Not only that, but she and Karen hadn’t seen each other in 30 years. About time.
I wanted to mention: when I was packing for this trip, I thought, wow, that purse is heavy, and I pulled out my wallet and poured out all the change that had accumulated in there. There was a lot. No need for that to be weighing me down.
And then, though it made no sense to me and I was marvelling at why I was doing this as I did this, I sorted the quarters out and put them all back in. Not just one or two, but about five dollars’ worth. That’s a lot of weight and a lot of quarters, but they wanted to march right back into that wallet and so they did.
At Stitches East on Saturday, Lynn suddenly realized that she had no quarters to feed the meter to keep from getting a ticket, and her time was about up out there. She was stressing out about it, while I suddenly remembered that moment of sitting picking those quarters back up. I opened my purse and gave them all to her. It was enough to take care of the whole rest of the day, and she was set.
I can’t think of any time I have enjoyed a few quarters quite so much.