#655 Sunday Lunch.

I was feeling extremely under the weather at bedtime last night and Ben told me that I absolutely HAD to sleep in while he went to the early service at church this morning. I felt bad for missing it, but I also don’t want to pass these germs along to any of the sweet folks at church who are sure to give me a hug or a handshake.

When Ben came home, I was feeling so much better. I slept all night, thank goodness! We took some leftover soup and pimiento and cheese to Jim and Mallorie’s because she was making jamabalaya and we love a good Sunday lunch.

We got there and as usual, their house was beautiful and smelled like home cooking (they say, but I’m too stuffy to smell anything at all). Pro football was on the living room TV, the hallmark of Sunday afternoons in the South. Her dinner table is painted in black chalkboard paint and she had written our names at our seats in chalk. There was a centerpiece of mercury glass and mini pumpkins that looked effortless—just like everything Mal does/wears/decorates. Sugar, their baby English bulldog, was padding around the table waiting for any crumbs that might fall.

We ate and talked and laughed and ate. I thought of how I might have rarely or never seen Mallorie again after college had Jim not come to my senior thesis in 2007. I can’t imagine life without Mal in it, my cousin by marriage and next door neighbor who felt like a blood relative long before she married Jim.

They tell me it was all delicious… but I’m too stuffy to taste anything at all.

Sundays are so good for you.