Packing up

After a rainy night, Friday morning dawned cool for the first time in over a week. I sat on the porch with my coffee wearing sweats as I did my journaling and DuoLingo lessons for the day. The birds provided their usual symphony , especially the eastern bluebird parents and their young.

My plan for the day was to get my bank check, make a pie with the cherries I had purchased at a farm market, procure ice cream for it, pack and nap. I wanted a low stress day because I would be picking up my friend Jill from the Philadelphia airport after midnight. The plan was to drive two hours to get around the NYC metro area in the wee hours and shorten the drive to Vermont the next day.

I left for the bank without my phone and realized I needed to confirm the exact spelling of the seller’s name, so back to get my phone. I joked with the teller that maybe the unvisrae was trying to tell me not to buy the trailer because I’d had so many glitches with the hitch place and the seller had two first names. Someone once told me you can’t trust people with two first names.

Since the day was already going sideways, I decided should get my debit card reinstated, especially if I’m going to be spending more time In Delaware. I waited briefly for the universal banker to discuss that.

She thought I wanted a card for my mom too because her account is linked to mine. I said, “oh no. Mom probably isn’t coming back to Delaware, but she will always have an account here because her father worked at the bank”. The banker asked me what was the name of the my grandfather. I’m like really? He retired in 1978.

However, Cheryl had been at the bank for 55 years except for the 13 months when she retired in 2013. That was shortly after M and T bought the once proud Wilmgton Trust that was toddering toward extinction due to improper practices. . And yes, she knew Leonard Barnes and remembered him as a nice person. This is why we joke that Delaware isn’t a state; it’s a club. But how nice was that?

Paperwork complete, I headed to Woodside Dairy for the ice cream. This is a local gem and where I took the girls to tell them we were moving to Minnesota in 2013. I left with just the quart of vanilla that I came for and headed back to start on the pie.

There is a reason people just buy the oversweetened, cornstarch laden cherry pie filling. Putting cherries is time consuming and monotonous. I had just enough time to make and roll out my lard based crust and bake the pie before going to pick up my car.

They said it would be ready at 4:30, so I took an Uber there arriving just before five. They were not done and not sure when it would be done. Thirty minutes to two hours! So I told my friend Ennis to meet me there instead of at the Gun Club so we could chat. As it turns out, it was only about 30 minutes and it was done.

When we got back to Bud and Sue’s, Bud made me take off the bike hitch and put on the trailer hitch several times so I would get the muscle memory. I may have released some flatulence during that exercise and we got the giggles under my car.

Visiting completed, Ennis aske me to lead her out to a main Highway because it was getting dark and she was not familiar with the back roads. By the time I returned it was past 8 pm and I hadn’t even really started to pack and a nap was not going to happen.

We had a little good bye silliness as I presented Bud and Sue with lighted garlands. Then Sue hard boiled some eggs for me and packed my food stuffs, while I organized everything else. At least until I got the trailer, it was going to be a bit cramped because I wouldn’t have the passenger seat for stuff once I got Jill. Tetris packing done, I set off at 11:30 pm as planned.