Getting Ready

I would really, really like to get out of here tomorrow morning early in order to get to Roseland in plenty of time to do what we need to do when we get there and then watch the sunset over the Sebastian River. 

Now you know this will not happen. I mean, hopefully we'll get there in time to watch the sunset but we aren't going to be early. I had thought I'd get everything packed up today and be ready to just hit the road at a reasonably early hour but of course I have not. I've packed a lot of things but not all. My clothes, mostly, and some kitchen stuff. My meds are all ready in their orderly little SMTWTFS boxes and so are our supplements. I have packed some toiletry items (why does the word "toiletry" still make me cringe a little?) and some different pairs of earrings. Glen hasn't packed a dang thing. I ironed five pairs of cargo shorts for him because the flaps always stick up and that drives him crazy. Ironing cargo sorts is not my favorite thing to do but he's my darling and if it makes him happy, I can certainly manage to iron down a few flaps. He swears he ironed a shirt in Las Vegas but I have a hard time envisioning that. 

I went to town around noon to pick up my dress at the alterations place and to take my silk dress for the lady to take up in the shoulders. I told her what I needed and as before, she brusquely directed me to the dressing room, said, "Go change," and when I came out wearing it I started to describe what I needed and she said, "I know! I know!" and pinned it all up in about four seconds and I'm sure it'll be perfect as is the dress she had waiting for me. 

I probably do not need to pack much more than that dress. In the eternal search for the perfect dress, that one is about it for me. 

The color is more truly as represented in the first picture. More red than hot pink. It's a happy dress. And yes, sort of a hippie dress too. 

Lis gave me another dress for my birthday and I love it! It fits me very well, and so no need to get it altered. It's more of a red-orange and the print is of parasols. 

I wore it to town today and felt, if not beautiful, at least wrapped in beauty. The fabric is a heavy rayon that has a wonderful drape to it. 

I am rich in dresses! 

The only problem I'm having besides being way behind on where I had wanted to be this evening, is that the GOD DAMN MOTHERFUCKING kidney stone has once more decided that it needs to stretch out. Or something. When I woke up this morning, I had generalized stomach pain and then the pain focused itself on that right kidney with sickening familiarity. 
If it does not bother me tonight, I will just assume it's another false alarm. I texted my sweet landlord down in Roseland to ask about the local ER and he said that he'd recently taken a friend there and they were quite capable. 
Capable of giving people with kidney stones morphine, I hope. 

So. I'm just trying to ignore the whole thing and get on with it. 

I have made so many pilgrimages to Roseland in the last several decades and yes, I do consider them all pilgrimages. I go there to seek the person I was as a child, to pay honor and respect to the little girl who found magic and reassurance in the river and the sky and the trees. To honor and pay respect to that magic and reassurance. 
This year, this visit, I feel as if I am going to honor the ladies I knew there, my grandmother and her friends who were all in their seventies when I knew them. I adored those women. They treated me so kindly and I loved their attitudes and their differing creativities and the way they all got their hair done every week, set and permed and tinted blue, and wore the finest of hair nets over their do's to protect them and how, it became popular among them for awhile to wear hairnets with tiny beads in them which I thought was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. I loved the sweater clips that they wore to keep their cardigans in place like capes when it was just cool enough to need one but not cold enough to want to wear it the normal way. I loved their rhinestones and their powder and rouge. 
I want to commune with them on this trip, now that I am one of them, age-wise, at least. I told this to my friend Mary Lane and she said, "Well, they're going to be awfully old now."

She is right! 

But who knows? Maybe Glenn, the dear Landlord, has found furniture or dishes that some of them, one of them, whatever...had in her own home. It is possible. 

Magic is magic and is sometimes the result of nothing more than chance and pragmatic possibility.

That's what I think, anyway. 

I am sure I'll be sort of missing in action for the next week. I'll probably be posting because I always have a lot to say in Roseland and there are always so many beautiful photos to take. But what I mainly want to do while I'm there is to take it all in from the white sand road by the river to the way the water makes a gulping sound beneath the dock and the way the crickets sound somehow different there than they do here, and the way the pelicans fly overhead and the egrets come to roost at sunset and the possibility of seeing dolphins and manatee and sharks and tarpon in the river as the sun goes down and turns the world golden. 

See you later but probably not too much later. 

Love...Ms. Moon