I'm Just Saying

This past Monday night, Oct. 27, taking back roads home from Greenville, South Carolina, what did I see in the window of a modest brick ranch out the passenger side window?

A Christmas tree.

Y’all: a six-footer, festooned with lights and doing its best to create a cozy ambience as the day’s Indian Summer ebbed into the mid 70s.

I tend to be hyperaware when synchronicity occurs. But even if these events seem meaningful, and I’m quite sure they must be meaningful, generally I can’t figure out why.

It sits staring down at me from the top of the refrigerator, smug in its power, attractive in its red and black, Scottish plaid, container:

The most enormous tin of Walker’s ‘Premium Short Bread Collection,’ pure butter cookies you’ve ever seen.

Oh, the mistake of cracking our bedroom’s french doors, leading to a back deck, for the cats to go in and out!

My eldest brother is currently traveling through England to visit and document my mother’s side of the family. It’s been an interesting trip, via emailed photographs, of familial homes both impressive and modest, from Devon, the original homestead, now in ruins, all the way to Northumberland and South Shields.

Positively wiggling with excitement, not unlike the terriers at dinnertime, Paul, hunter-gatherer that he is, came bursting through the front door with the prey he had tracked all the way to Costco.

As I celebrate yet another trip around the sun in the next week, it is my hope that, if nothing else, I’ve picked up various scraps of wisdom that is supposedly the trade-off for crows feet and that one, odd hair that...

Nevermind.

My mother once told me, while vigorously polishing the silver, that when she had last traveled to England to visit her own mother, she had watched her settle down upon the sofa and was horrified to hear her remark, with much feeling: “A nice cup of tea and something good on the telly. What more could one want?”