I must have refreshed her profile page a hundred times, hoping nobody snagged her. Finally, we drove over to the shelter where we watched an employee unlock the front doors. I waited a respectful two minutes before barging inside, asking if we could meet Penny.
I was sifting through the bins at the pay-by-weight Goodwill when I happened upon a cob of corn. Yes, you heard me right. Between the broken Barbie campers and the punctured tennis racquets and the stuffed animals begging to be loved again, there lay a cob of corn.
I was in a rut – a big ol’ nasty rut with work, feeling trapped by the mundane day-to-day. That’s when I got the call from my dear friend Leah.
Making decisions about what to get rid of is one of the many burdens aging bestows on those fortunate enough to last. I’ve recently been trying to make them myself.
I was sitting at the bar of a subpar pub. On the stool next to me sat a glittering heap of rouge and jewels which proved to be a woman of advanced years. She couldn’t’ve been a duchess, not at O’Finnegan’s. But there was something distinctly aristocratic about the way she fingered her pearls.
On Christmas Eve, I stand at the sink, pry open baseball navels, the perfect world of orange: heady zest to the nose, the bitter pith, my thumbs’ push, push to separate flesh from thick rind, not unlike pushing from the old year to the new, birthing the long hidden into daylight.
