Well around midnight before the Memorial Day holiday I realized my fridge was giving out. Of course we had just gone grocery shopping and had a fridge full of spoiling food. I also knew it would be very hard to find anyone to come on Memorial Day. To make matters worse, our back-up fridge from the 1950’s had quit working a few days prior. It was one of those “UGH” moments. So frustrating. And yet, in light of recent events and real tragedies, I quickly reminded myself-while this little ordeal may cost us a pretty penny–they are just refrigerators.
Thankfully we did find a super nice friend of a friend handyman who came to our rescue, and at least one of our fridges is back in operation on this beautiful, hot day.
We had a fun day Saturday, swimming with cousins, and then all the teenagers had a sleepover. God bless the parent who had to listen to all those shrieks and screams all night, I’m sure. But I’m sure it was worth every shriek. Sleepovers with your cousins is a special time.
I won’t forget the many long nights I spent lying in dark, cracking up, over and over again about the silliest things with my cousin Cindy, my partner in crime. Or the many silly things we did. We would often make “coupons” to try to manipulate her mom into letting us have sleepovers and other things. I can’t remember exactly how that system worked, but I remember being very passionate about it. For several months or years we even published a “Family News”, where we recounted what little cousin was learning to crawl or whatever funny story a relative told us, as well as all of our dad’s favorite jokes. We made the Family News in Grandpa Calame’s office on Sundays. That was serious business.
One day, Cindy’s daddy (Uncle Richard) got a wild hare and let us paint murals all over their white bedroom wall. He never got around to finishing painting it I guess, so he figured he’d let us do the job. Boy, were we thrilled! Soon their bedroom wall was filled with horses and houses and rainbows and God knows what else. It was colorful, that’s for sure.
Then there was a time where we found an old cassette tape buried in a dirt pile next door (while we trespassed in our boy cousin’s backyard. They were boys, so they were enemies. The dweeb boys had used that cassette tape to record “all of their most important secrets that they didn’t want anyone to know”. It was a gold mine for two knieving cousins in that boys versus girls age.
And then, since Cindy lived right next to the old country convenience store back then, there were the times that we would sneak over to the store and snatch all the lottery tickets that people dropped on the ground. Many of them would only half-scratch them, and those were our favorites. We just knew some dummy would drop a winning Weekly Grand. Never panned out, but I will say we probably had more fun scratching and searching through those used lottery tickets with a hope and dream of winning, than we ever could have with the real money. Yep those were memories I won’t ever forget.
Still, to this day, if I am walking through a parking lot and see a lottery ticket on the ground, I am compelled to pick it up and double check it. I am not too disappointed when I don’t win though, because, hey, if I do win, most likely I’ll just have to use it to buy new refrigerators or something like that! It’s definitely more fun to dream!