I called my mom this morning and talked to her with a recovering voice that still makes me sound like a chain-smoker. “I wanted to send you flowers,” I said, “but the cheapest ones were, like, thirty bucks.” My dear understanding mom appreciated my decision to wait until I returned to give her a floral expression of my love.
After mass, the whole M. family visited a coffee shop for lunch, and I ate a huge breakfast burrito. As the kids finished up, I stole over to a piano hugging the wall near the cash register and began to play. After ten days away from my chosen instruments (and four away from my voice), the sensation of my fingers against the keys was a whisper of spring air and a reminder of home.
Later in the day, I learned how to change a tire. Rock-riddled dirt roads and old van tires don’t mix, as we discovered. As a Wyoming wind lashed around my church clothes, I knelt in the dust and jacked up the car, then helped unscrew the lug nuts. I looked up at the gray-clouded sky and the wild gray landscape, dotted with scrubby bushes and lined with milennia of geology, and I thought, “I’m changing a tire in Wyoming.” And I was happy.
Do I miss my mother today? Of course. Deeply. But I’m also glad to be here, glad to be able to attend mass and play a piano and change a tire and pack up my backpack— in Wyoming.
~Lisa Shafter
Money spent today: $0
Leeway so far: $124.05
Kristy'a comment while you were playing,
ReplyDelete"We've got to get a piano."