Daily Notes- July 31st

From one of the Food sources online that love to send me pictures of FOOD.  The ratio of vegetable to meat and cheese seems okay.  Looks like mayo and ketchup.  Pickles.  Cheese.  Don't see onions.  I like onions and bacon.  Terrible to see on a hot day like today.  Heat index of 103. Hot and still.

I watered the garden, my Grow Boxes, the flowers in the three planters, and the Peach Trees.  Oh, and the very hot back deck.  My work for today is done.  Forgot....I picked a very large colander of blueberries.  And not ONE single mosquito bite.  My body chemistry must have changed.  I am no longer a siren of desire for the bloodthirsty beings.

Hello Dolly suffered from a lack of sustained enthusiasm last night: audience and performers.  The audience finally woke up about 15 minutes before the curtain came down.  Which is the same lack of enthusiasm they felt for Sophisticated Ladies.  The audience just sat there.  And then to ruin a good ending--they decided to beg for money for a leaking roof.  Last summer it was a fork lift.  Sigh!.

I am reading Summer of 69.  The Summer of 69- the same months as this book--  we had left college and driven to Georgia for G's first job out of college. My husband had received notice that he had been called for active military duty (Vietnam) after we had arrived in Georgia.  We asked for a one year deferment as he was the sole support of a wife and a baby due in August.  He had to drive all night to get from Georgia where we lived to Ohio where he had registered for the draft.  He did get one year's deferment.  And the next year they had the draft lottery.  So Summer of 69 was a hard summer.  And in August we had a baby.  And no money to buy anything for this baby but cotton diapers, rubber pants and baby bottles.  A greenhouse manager didn't make a lot of money. My mother had sent a crib along with my dad when we drove from college to Georgia.  So the baby had a bed (G and I didn't).  It's hard to remember exactly how poor we were.

G's cousin (who lived in Georgia) arrived one day with a brown grocery bag filled with his baby  son's outgrown clothes (tiny little snap front white tee shirts), blankets etc.  And that's what our child wore for her first year--the contents of that grocery bag (and our son wore the same clothes when he arrived). This same cousin found us an inexpensive but clean apartment and a rattan table and chairs --- at an old furniture sale- and a bed frame for the mattress and box springs that we managed to buy.  And he had the seller agree to payments for the table and chairs.

The table and chairs I use when writing my morning pages.

My first and most memorable Random Acts of Kindness.

So reading this book is bringing back terrifying memories and sweet memories.  Of a time of such terror and joy.  Sometimes in the same moments.  And Apollo 11.  I think that's the flight the author of the book mentions. I could be wrong.  And no baby quilt--perhaps that's why I make them?