Hello dearest love, many happy returns. I hope you’ve been having a wonderful day, or if largely a pedestrian one, with a few special moments delightful to you scattered throughout, such as this one I’m sure, I won’t be coy, but I’m not there to take you out for – well, whatever it is you like to be taken out for.

Dearest, I’m fading. I had a great day. It felt like getting back to normal. I loved that I created something yesterday - but it was at the expense of everything else – shower, getting dressed, meal prep, walk, pilates – my daily everything. D grumbled a bit yesterday that he had to make his own lunch. I simply couldn’t be torn away from what I was doing. Any more than I had already been torn away – that is, then inadvertently, standing in the sunny walk-in closet (what in Brownstone Brooklyn would definitely be regarded a room – study, or nursery). I had the iron going and unbeknownst to me also the electric radiator in the bathroom that dries and warms our towels. Suddenly everything went off – I’d blown a fuse. Which shuts off the whole upstairs, my computer included. Oh aaarggh splutter *** fng aarggh. Fortunately though now, sort of like my refresher course in pumping gas, I know how to fix the fuse. I went outside in midmorning in my pink minotaur outfit (light pink cashmere tops with hot pink leggings – you know, discreet, incognito – hey it’s the country!), swung open the metal basement door, stooped the whole time truly like Alice, and made my way through the horrifying cavernlike, sumped, low-ceilinged, rubble and detritus-strewn, dimly lit creepy underbelly of the house, floors above which I take great pains to keep tidy, vacuumed and dusted, and here this horror, all the while, below. I found the errant switch and switched it to the left like voting on old machines, and departed, outside again jiggling a lever on the basement door that keeps the coffinlike diagonal door securely ajar.

I should be grateful that it didn’t slam shut while I was in the creepy tomb below and that the whole time I pretended I was a friendly acquaintance of mine who is well over six feet all – he’s so tall that he instinctively stoops for fear of banging his head – and that I had remembered to put on the basement light in the first place – a switch in the kitchen next to the one that turns the furnace on & off (dear reader, which switch do you suppose I toggled first?).

Then I marched back upstairs in the hope of staying in the moment of conceiving something – and the power was still out. Turns out that fuse is or isn’t like old voting machines. I had to go back down into the completely unhygienic seeming bowels (yet we don’t get sick - so are such basements, such foundations normal, well – we do have a high water table – but why isn’t it broom clean?)

Okay I have enough to worry about in the habitable floors – it’s really best that I’m always kept pretty much in complete denial in the basement, don’t you think? Yeah, I think. Darling, I have lost track of my parentheses, commas, and semi-colons, sort of like when I used to be a chainsmoker. Which by the way I no longer am – haven’t partook in I think it is 13 years right around this time as a matter of fact.

So I had to put the fuse back – switch it back to the left to make it line up with the others. Oh what a genius I am. How did I know which fuse – one of a long otherwise undifferentiated row? I threw the one that looked different, out of place. And was ever so happy that the house didn’t explode. What if that Virginia earthquake had occurred while I was down in this awful basement?

It’s your special day – let’s get out of that crazy unspeakable zone… basement door slammed shut, metal thwack for real, good riddance. I’ll never run the iron and the electric radiator at the same time ever again… and I foreswore the blow drier after I tinted my hair this morning… and then cleaned the bath because what could be more abject to have tint in one’s hair for 25 minutes AND to clean the bath? Might as well maximize it all, combine two dreary tasks. And now I have fresh locks and a clean bath to show for it, and like a tagged butterfly hardly dragged down, despite.

I’ve returned from my haircut, locks intact – they still fall to my shoulders. Bought flowers on my way home and I’ve gone about the house refreshing vases.

dearest, all my love, many many kisses, you are always in my thoughts & dreams, and will be again and again and again

Many happy returns

***
darling, my original post crashed
had to reconstruct
affects grammar, spelling, punctuation
not to mention missing sections of text
but not at all - my abiding thoughts of you
sweet dreams dearest