This is the most unusual birthday Martha has ever celebrated. We had originally planned to spend the weekend at Snowbird Mountain Lodge - re-scheduled from our Anniversary in July - but we decided to cancel again. We still do not feel safe eating in restaurants (or Lodge dining rooms), or traveling, or even ordering take-out. An alternative closer to home would have been Paesanos, our favorite restaurant of all where we have celebrated many special occasions, but we decided against that, too. So we opted to stay home on this Saturday and celebrate quietly this landmark 65th birthday.
A flower arrangement had appeared on the dining room table, courtesy of Crown Heritage Flowers in Highlands, and birthday cards had arrived as well as dozens of Facebook greetings. But it rained off and on through the night and was still coming down this morning, dissolving into fog one minute and then resuming again a few minutes later. I had been able to increase my mileage this week and did not want to miss an opportunity of a long run despite the radar on my phone, which showed plenty of green and yellow patches sliding in rapidly from the East.
When I arrived at the Park, the rain had almost stopped, and I started off around the block to complete a mile before the others arrived. By the time I reached Townsite Apartments, it was raining pretty hard, and needless to say, the "others" never arrived because they had enough sense to get in out of the rain. But the rain again stopped by the time I had returned to the Park, persuading me to go another mile or two. Again, far from any shelter, it began coming down in earnest. I took shelter at the School, took off my shirt, and wrung it out, the first of many times. This is what my running friend Morris used to call a "character-building" run. And just as I had that thought, I came around the corner and Morris himself was walking, umbrella in hand and rain parka keeping him dry. He is still nursing a knee injury, but at least he was out walking, and better yet, he had seen me, building up my character.
After four miles, it really did seem that it was going to stop. Fog began to replace rain again, and I completed two more miles in nice conditions without even needing to wring out my shirt. I thought Martha might have arrived by now, but I did not see her car. But when I returned home, the driveway was empty, and in a short time she appeared, drenched as I was. We compared notes and she, too, had been lured into running by a brief lull in the rain, and then had gotten caught in a downpour. Not everybody can claim celebrating her 65th birthday by going for a run in the rain!
I made some lunch, and then in the afternoon baked some apple turnovers - the least I could do on a rained-out pandemic-thwarted birthday. The humidity affected the crust and they were not the prettiest turnovers I had made, but they suffused the house with the lovely aroma of baking apples.
What to do next on this rainy afternoon at home? “If we were at the beach, or even here in Highlands, and things were normal, we might go to a matinee,” Martha said. So that's what we did, closing the drapes in the sunroom and watching a Netflix movie we had received a week or two ago and had not found the time to watch. And snacking on turnovers warm from the oven.
Martha had already told me, despite my offers to prepare a dinner for her, that she would like to have shrimp and grits, a dinner that she has perfected over the years and that is not in my own repertoire. So the birthday girl prepared her own dinner (although I did stir the grits from time to time at her direction to keep them from sticking to the pan), a combination of a couple of different recipes, baked in a skillet, and absolutely the best she has ever made.
So Happy Birthday, Martha, on this unusual Shrimp and Grits birthday! I am glad you got to go for a run on your birthday. And I am grateful that you are such a good cook! And I love you.
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