I'm Just Saying

It had been a mild, if slightly cloudy day, when I headed out to drive my Mobile Meals route.

If Paul and I can go a month without a vet bill, it’s cause to clink two beer cans together in celebration.

Yep, I jinxed us, alright.

It was but a couple of weeks after I opined one evening to Paul, “You know, it’s been a few years since any stray cat showed up here at the farm...” that we discovered our marmalade cat, lying near death beneath the tool shed.

Sweet William, as I like to call him, or Willy, has taken up residence in the downstairs bathroom.

For the first time, ever, I managed to lose my debit card.   

And I was out of checks (those are pieces of paper on which you actually write how much money you want to pay and to whom, kiddies).

“Did you leave it at a store?” Paul asked as I, in a panic, began to ransack the kitchen and bedroom.

Every now and then I will rummage through old books–correction, old children’s books that I have kept since pilfering them from my elementary school’s library and, more commonly, received as gifts from adored, overseas English aunts who always mailed them, as Julie Andrews would approve, in ‘brown paper packages, tied up with strings.’

My friend, Ruby, who is relatively new to the area, texted me in a pickle.

“I’m going to a baby shower and I’ve not seen any baby boutiques in the area,” she wrote.

“Google, baby,” I shot back, while tacking up a horse in the barn.

“Google ‘baby’?” she replied. “Instead of baby boutiques?”

I’ve jinxed us.