~ It was the kind of day when every dog on my running route barked, not with the joy of being a dog, but AT me.

~ It was the kind of day when I had a technological success that I can never repeat because I have no idea how I did it.

~ It was the kind of day when the crepemyrtles were one scant day past their perfection.

~ It was the kind of day to buy Adirondack chairs at the new Walmart and then place them in a neighborly, Joanna-Beatty-Taft way in the front yard, recline, sip tea, and glimpse through the hemlocks the back of the new Walmart.

~ It was the kind of day when a friend told Andrew to send something to her phone and he responded that he didn’t have a Smartphone because he is a luddite, and she said yes she knew what a luddite was because she looked it up on her Smartphone.

~ It was the kind of day to regret never mastering algebra and calculus because I have to teach kids in a few weeks how to score high on a test that includes both, but also a day to pull myself up by my bootstraps and resolve that any woman with a grain of sense can ‘simplify a cubed root with variables’!  It isn’t rocket science.  It’s a recipe for cooking down an herbed rutabaga stew.

~ It was the kind of day to visit the girls – and allied children I claim as mine – and marvel at who they are.

Adrienne, Eliot, Mad-Dog, Abby, Eliza, Justin, Callie, Will, Sarah

~ It was the kind of day when a dollar bought a squeeze bottle for soap at the kitchen sink, because pretty matters.

~ It was the kind of day to discover that if I lay on the left side of the bed, I can see the mountain as I read the Bible – “Then sings my soul, my Savior, God, to Thee. How great Thou art!”

It was that kind of day.

~