Elgan speaks
...and her words thunder across the land

Niceness

Saturday, Aug. 16, 2008
4:49 p.m.
I want to write about my day yesterday, and I keep putting it off; maybe because I still need to savour the experience and maybe because I’m afraid that by writing about it, I will make it smaller, when I want it to remain large in my memory.

I got up early and hung out a load of laundry which I had washed the night before. I bathed, dressed, collected my passport, my cell phone, whatever American money we had in the house (a paltry $16), printed out a Google map and kissed my family goodbye and headed south of the border. I bought gas at Burroughs Falls where it’s always 2� cheaper than Sh’brooke and crossed into the U.S. of A. much earlier than I’d planned, the weather being good and the roads fairly empty. From there I bore west and arrived in the picturesque town of Newp0rt, VT, on beautiful Lake Memphrémag0g, a body of water that has its extremities in both national jurisdictions.

I was supposed to meet the diarist formerly known as essaywriter at Nora Café, but I couldn’t find it. So I parked instead outside a supermarket and realtor and called her on my cellphone (the cellphone which I never use) to let her know I was earlier than anticipated and where I was. She arrived just minutes later in her new Subaru Outback which she parked next to my not-so-new Subaru Outback. So of course we started off our conversation with how much we loved our cars and how we weren’t lesbians, even though this was our vehicle of choice.

From there we found a place to have an early lunch (after failing to find the restaurant the realtor directed us to) at a natural foods café and health food store. It was delicious, as well as being nutritious. See, those two things don’t have to be mutually exclusive! Over lunch we chatted about her writing workshop, my mother’s move and whatever else popped into our heads. There didn’t seem to be any constraints on our conversation. It flowed very smoothly and easily from one topic to the next.

After lunch we walked down to the wharf and I took pictures of us with the lake in the background. It was an absolutely beautiful day. We wandered in and out of shops on Main Street, including a jewelry store where the proprietor had a wall display of fishing lures, the origin of which he happily explained to us. We had gone in because of something that had caught our eye in the window and then were amused to discover that it wasn’t the same thing. For Essaywriter it had been a string of baroque pearls, for me it was an art deco-style pin in the shape of a dragonfly.

In one gallery she purchased a hank of hand-spun, hand-dyed yarn for using in an as-yet-undetermined craft project. In a yarn and textile shop I found and purchased a couple of Tunisian crochet hooks for Little Princess. I was short the necessary change, and so I now owe Essaywriter 42�.

When we said our goodbyes, the clouds had drifted in and a light rain was sprinkling us, a sign that we should both be headed homewards. I drove north with a warm, fuzzy feeling inside. Even though it was our first actual meeting in the flesh, we both felt as though we had known each other for years, which I guess we have.

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