#1,199 Lisa + Perfume & Concrete.

First of all, I’m going to ask any of my readers who will, to pray for Lisa. Don’t just say you will, please actually do this. We can’t let the phrase “I’ll pray for you” become a platitude, it cheapens something that’s so important. We literally can’t do anything more powerful. Lisa is a reader just like you, and she’s having a major surgery to remove all of her cancer on Wednesday morning and I bet she would really appreciate our prayers for her anxiety, that she’ll find comfort and healing. I hope she doesn’t mind that I shared it with you, but I felt like I should.

Side note: I’ve learned as I get older that prayer works like this (for me). I’m very worried or upset about something. The moment I begin to pray, and it’s casually, just the way I would speak to Phil Rasberry, my daddy, I ask this great and powerful daddy to be with me, to show me the way. And this NEVER fails to give me instant relief from my anxiety, and my problem (whatever it is, doesn’t matter) becomes unimportant. A challenge that will improve me, not a problem that will ruin me. And let me tell y’all something… I am EXCELLENT at worrying. Like… Hard core. You can’t touch my anxiety level. I’m working on it all the time, though.

So!

I slept a little later than I meant to. I had a bowl of cereal in the living room and watched spring time happening outside the window. Watched my neighbor headed out to run her errands for the day, the older man with the neck brace who walks his expensive little dog every morning, the museum ladies coming and going from the pottery workshop next door. It’s nice to watch the world in the morning. Everyone has something to do, and they all seem happy about it.

I heard the mailbox squeak open and close, the mailman scanning the box with a beep that  to me says, “Come see what you got today!” And in the mailbox… Was Aroma Tonic perfume. I am mortified by what it cost me to have this bottle of discontinued perfume that was $40 in 2002. But my memories are so connected to scents, the more I thought of it the more I realized I had to find it again to feel springtime and summer as a 16 year old. Thank you, eBay.

It smells almost exactly like white tea and ginger from Bath and Body Works so I’ve effectively wasted a lot of money, but at least I’ll have a real bottle of it forever. 
Then this evening, Ben (who cut an inch and a half off his beard this morning):
Saw some city workers replacing a sidewalk and asked if we could have the old busted up sidewalk pieces to use as pavers to make some pathways in our backyard. They said it was all ours. For free!
So we’re stacking it in the backyard until there’s time to make paths. Can’t wait to see that finally come to fruition!
Then we took the pups for a pickup ride while we put out some more yard signs.
Then Chevy got carsick and puked. The end.