Sunday

My damned headache is mostly gone. As long as I don't spin my head around or rise or bend too quickly, everything seems fairly normal. My eye sockets are sore but my head is not. Thank you for all the well wishes.
I just spent the morning on my front porch, rocking. Overweight cat in lap, sprawled from my tummy to my knees. He is so tolerant of me. I picked him up and hugged him. Clearly he did not enjoy this, but he looked at me as if to say, "Okay, I let you do this because I love you." Then I turned him around and held him in the croook of my arm like a baby. I rubbed his tummy and kissed his nose. I love you but not that much, he said, and his eyes darted from side to side as he planned an escape. I realized his diilemma and released him before he excaped, because a rejection from your own cat is just too humiliating.
We had a yardsale yesterday and my gf who is also a writer shared our yard with us. She lives in a charming house at the end of the street and yard sale ppl tend to like the center of the neighborhood, not the ends. She has a charming picket fence, and yard sale ppl seem hesitant to open the gate. Most everything about her is charming, and I enjoy time with her.
She had two wicker chairs for sale and would not budge on the price. Two for $65. Yard sale ppl tried to bargain her down, only the yard sale ppl with taste, as these chairs are really quite charming, but she would not budge. These are good chairs, quite charming, and really worth $65. In the end no one bought them and she loaded them up in her car and went home. A moment later she returned. She idled her car in front of our house and called to me through her car window: You want these chairs? YES! I yelled and she just gave them to me. Last night I rearranged our porch so the wicker chairs are in protected areas, will not be rained on, and they look simply...charming.
She also gave me a paperback book written by a friend of hers. When she lived Chapel Hill she was in the same writers' group as this woman. The book is called, "A Broom of One's Own," and I finished reading it today, out on the porch with the chairs and the cat and very loud singing birds. The sun is shining and it is a perfect North Carolina spring morning.
The book is about being a writer, about the battle between needing income and needing to write and forsaking writing for financial survival and trying to do both and finally coming to resolution with the whole thing. It is interspersed with observations of the people for whom she cleans houses, because, yes, for most of the book she cleans people's homes to make ends meet.
Her writing has a wonderful cadence and speaks to my heart. It's a short book, only 169 pages, and I finished it this morning.
I must think of something I can do for my gf. I got two very charming chairs and a book that has really made me think.