Close Encounters of the Humankind

[Phalon]

Think about all the people you meet....your friends, acquaintances, or just people you run into - not in a vehicular sense, because we aren't counting points, just encounters. The encounters we have - the good, the bad, and the ugly - and how those encounters affect us in, sometimes small, and sometimes, very big ways.

This thread - if it goes any further than this one post - can be about people; anything about people. What gave me the idea was a chance meeting I had last week that reminded me of someone I haven't thought of in years, and years. It was coincidental how I was connected in a small way to this person I'd never met...and kinda cool.

It was nice outside and I was putzing around in the yard, looking for any excuse to be outside. A man came walking down the sidewalk; I'd seen him before, and we'd wave hello, but he was always on the other side of the street, so we never talked.

This time he crossed over to the Dark Side - he was walking down my side of the street. He stopped to introduce himself. He and his wife recently bought the house near the end of the street after retiring and moving here from Chicago - though he was not originally from Chicago, he said; he grew up in Michigan, on the other side of the state. I asked him where, and it was in a small town close to the town where some of my cousins lived. I spent many summers there, playing at a neighbor's farm with my cousins, and all the neighbor kids. Oh, he says - my wife grew up in that town also; what's your cousins' last name. I told him, and he said his wife was best friends with one of my older cousins. Really? What's your wife's name? His wife is the older sister of the girl I used to play with while visiting. We were the same age, and she lived two doors down from my cousin, and across the street from the farm. I haven't seen her, or her sister, (who I remember as being a bossy-know-it-all; poor man, I wonder if she's changed over the years), in about thirty years.

It's weird how the people you meet can relate back to others you once met; everything is connected in some way it seems....and, I'm sure, it is all Kevin Bacon's doing.

[Scrappy Amazon]

The Oracle at Phalon......

[Mini Mia]

Several years ago, when we were in Florida taking a ride in the glass-bottom boat, we met our old neighbors from the next farm over. They had moved away years before, but still live in the same county. Funny we would run into them there, and not around here.

[Mini Mia]

Good Grief! I've got close encounters of the non-human kind. I wish the skunks wouldn't turn loose their stench around the heating & a/c unit. Gag me. Makes me wish my nose were clogged up. Well, not really. I hate not being able to breathe worse than inhaling skunk stench.

[Mini Mia]

P.U. Every time the heat kicked on during the night I woke up gagging. And today, the outside smells fresh and clean, but the inside still reeks of skunk. I guess all of the smell got sucked into my house, where it will stay until it vaporizes.

[Phalon]

Poor Joxie. Too bad Lysol does not come in fresh tomato juice scent.

Just drink a Bloody Mary and pretend.

[Mini Mia]

I could still smell it on the sheets and blankets when I pulled them up around my neck. I don't seem to notice it as much in the house now, until I come in after being outside. It's not as strong as the day before though. I sprayed Febreze on the curtains and the bed to try and make it vanish quicker.

This isn't the first time it's happened, but the other times weren't as bad as this time. That skunk must have sprayed the heat/air unit itself. But then I'm sure the smell would have lingered outside, and it hasn't. Go figure. Oh, the joys of living out in the country.

[Phalon]

I wonder if it crawled in there to make the unit its winter abode? The squirrels here are forever trying to build nests in the central air unit. If the skunk let loose it's skunk funk close to the unit, it wouldn't be sucked into the house because the unit blows air out, yes?

[Mini Mia]

phalon said:

I wonder if it crawled in there to make the unit its winter abode? The squirrels here are forever trying to build nests in the central air unit.

The unit is closed up, so nothing should be able to get inside of it.

If the skunk let loose it's skunk funk close to the unit, it wouldn't be sucked into the house because the unit blows air out, yes?

I've no clue. I just know that when the heat kicked on, the air blowing into all the rooms reeked of skunk. And thankfully I didn't notice it when I came in after being outside today, so perhaps it's gone now.

It happens from time to time, so I'm used to it. Just not used to getting it as strongly and this last time.

[Phalon]

I met the most interesting woman today - LX's friend's mother. They recently moved here from Indiana, and this is the first time LX's friend's been over to the house; she's spending the night. I had to go pick her up from her house, because they have no car - they "went green", the mother explained.

No car, and most of the year, no house - May through October they live on a 30 foot sailboat docked at the marina. Now how cool is that....when the weather is nice.

I could not imagine living without a car; not here anyway. Our downtown is walkable; I run most of the errands I have down there leaving from my house on foot. But shoot - everything else is out of town - long distances of of town. And small towns generally don't have public transportation; ours doesn't, unless you count the one or two mini-buses that'll come to your house to pick you up and take you somewhere in town - if you schedule the trip a day in advance.

But she is an Earth Sign; she confirmed the fact that she was many times in the fifteen minutes I spent at her winter-house. I'm not sure what an Earth Sign is, but with the boat, and this winter-house, I'd peg her for more of a Water Sign; whatever a Water Sign is, I'm not sure of that either. Nor am I sure why she kept telling me of her Earth Signness.

The house! Their house sits with the beach out one window, (the beach, Scraps, where LX took the picture of the gulls that looked like they were walking uphill on a flat land - how'd she manage that?), lighthouse out another, and channel, less than a stone's throw from a third. It'd be dangerous for me to live there; I'd run the risk of sitting in front of the windows all day. As it was, I was mesmerized watching the waves roll down the channel as she told me once again she was an Earth Sign.

Whether all this greenness is the result of her recent divorce, which she mentioned between Earth Sign confirmations - (she got the boat; that she told me. He got the house and SUV?) - or because she's truly gone totally "green", this is one high-energy woman; screw the electric company - she seems to create all she needs herself. Sheesh, she wore me out.

[Phalon]

Well, I ran into the Green Earth-Sign Woman again recently; our paths have crossed a handful of times since I wrote the post about her, and I have to admit I've cringed inwardly during each chance meeting. I find her to be more manufactured and artificially plastic than "green", and I suppose when I wrote the post, I was trying to change my first impression of her by attempting to come up with some redeeming qualities. Sigh. I came up short.

Have you ever done that? Tried to influence your own first impressions of a person by thinking to yourself, 'dang, give this person a chance, will ya'. There is a Chinese proverb that says: "Don't be over self-confident with your first impressions of people." Give the person the benefit of the doubt. But it is also said that first impressions are lasting impressions, and I guess that's the category the Green Earth-Sign Woman fits into in my mind; she struck me as being "phony" the first time I met her, and unfortunately, each meeting since as only re-enforced that feeling.

* * *

Conversely, I bumped into a couple of women the other day who I never mind bumping into. We needed milk, and rather than go to the grocery store, I stopped in the quick-mart at the gas station - something I don't normally do, because I think "Gas Station Milk" tastes different than "Grocery Store Milk".....yeah, yeah, roll your eyes. Hubs does too. But "Gas Station Milk" takes only a quarter of the time to purchase, than does "Grocery Store Milk". Run in, run out, and in two minutes, you're on your way again.

Inside, making my way to the dairy case, a woman smiled at me and I smiled back. I didn't recognize her at first, until she came up behind me and called me by name. She lives around the corner from us; LX and her daughter went to elementary school together, and though they are a grade apart, the mother and I became fairly close acquaintances just from seeing each other at the school a lot. I haven't seen her since fall, right after she underwent neck surgery and was in a metal-brace contraption, walking around the track while I was roller-skiing. Her neck is healed; surgery did wonders; now she's just had knee surgery, and the gas-station three houses down from her house was her first excursion since the surgery. She just wanted to get out of the house, and thought she'd grab a cup of coffee. (I wonder if Gas Station Coffee tastes different than other coffee?)

We chatted for about twenty minutes until both my hand grew uncomfortably numb from holding the cold gallon of milk, and her Gas Station Coffee turned icky-cold.

Backing out from the parking space, a van stopped, blocking my way, and I thought "WTF" until a familiar furry head poked out of the passenger-side window. Xena-Sis and her ever present driving companion, Dog Bailey. I haven't seen her in a couple weeks; both our families had run-ins with the flu. Another twenty minutes or so spent chatting, and my quick run-in-the-store/run-out-of-the-store turned into a forty minute trip.

I laughed at the different stereotypical places there are in women's lives: When we're young, we meet our friends after work at a bar for a drink or two. Older women have their gatherings - bridge, knitting, and gardening clubs. Middle-aged mothers rely on chance-meetings at the Shell Station Mini-Mart.

[Phalon]

Siren said this in Moonglum's "East Anglian Mornings" thread:

I would love to see those little villages, MG. I have a very romantic image of them in my mind. If they're not as lovely as I imagine, don't tell!

I've had the fortunate opportunity to visit England a few times. We stayed in London, but with the great BritRail system, we were able to travel by train, and see through the train windows some of the country, and walk the streets of Canterberry, Salisbury, and a few other little villages along the way. And the images are romantic, Siren! But we experienced everything through tourist's eyes.

Recently, in the writers group I belong to, I've heard some wonderful stories of England, told by women who've lived there, and the images I've gotten by listening, are just as romantic.

And the story of how these women met, I think, is a neat one, and shows what a small world this one really can be.

Both women are about the same age, and grew up in England during the war; one just on the outskirts of London, and the other a few miles further outside the city. In her teens, one married an American G.I., and moved to his small hometown in Michigan, a few miles from here. The other immigrated with her family to Chicago a year later, married, and retired here to South Haven, where I live. Two continents, two states, two different itty-bitty small towns, and over fifty years later, (and they both still have that wonderful-sounding English accent), after living nearly all their lives only miles apart, they finally met at the library, and have become best of friends.