My presence is required...

ahhhhh, Atlanta. Back at Sean’s parents’ house again. We are doing the slow dance of preparing for a Saturday afternoon of errands: going to a nursery to shop for herbs, my snooping for culinary supplies, Jeff’s search for a pair of dress shoes.

We are here for a college friend’s wedding. Missy, whom I have not seen in a year or two. It will be a chance for Jeff to re-establish contact with college friends that have drifted to the waysides of work and marriage. An afternoon’s chance to find out where the people who once populated his everyday life have moved to.

We will seem different to them, I am sure; despite the fact that both Jeff and I radiated “permanently single friend” for our first few years of college, we were one of the first couples to marry—in fact, we did so right out of school. Doing so gave us an almost old-guard image; we are the Old Married Couple, Jeff-and-Amy, no longer quite the separate people we once were, pre-ceremony.

Ah—life interferes. Sean’s mother is offering us crepe myrtles for our yard. Pink- or purple-blooming, approximately a dozen. For our bare yard, this would be a boon. Next we need trees and flowering plants.

Thus, I should sign off of this laptop, sitting in the chilly basement office of the house, and venture up into the yard, into the sunlight. Pick out the new shrubbery for my lawn; for, it seems, that life isn’t going to wait long enough for me to set down my thoughts today like I’d wanted to.

Ouch—must go NOW—it seems they’re digging these extraneous crepe myrtles up out of the lawn now, and my presence is required…

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