It's Saturday, I'm waiting for a phone call, and bored. A perfect time to post this next batch of pieces I wrote for the online thing. Anyway, I love to see them in print, even if it's just for me and my one or two friends who read this. HA!

Just went back and counted...eleven pieces! I think I got a little carried away. Don't miss the new ones on the second page!


When I posted this one yesterday online, I thought is was junk, but one of my online partners saw something I hadn't even intended. She said it was a "portrait of LOVE." Oh My...



HE THOUGHT IT WAS LOST


“Don’t tell me you’ve lost it again,” Jeanie said. She was sitting at the kitchen table sorting through the day’s mail.

“Yes, I did,” her husband Marty said. He looked at the table where she had carefully set up her system of little plastic bins. Red for urgent attention, green for friends and family’s correspondence, yellow for questionable, and black for shredding or trash. Why couldn’t she just make piles like normal people? He sighed. But he knew better than to argue with an obsessive compulsive’s system, just as she knew better than to chastise him for his insecurities.

They’d been through all that at the beginning of their relationship. Jeanie had insisted that the ground rules between them were clear before she said, “I do.”

At first he’d worried about it with all of his usual anxiety ridden “what if’s” but after ten years of a clearly well functioning marriage he mostly agreed.

“Did you look in the green bowl on your dresser?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“How about the bookshelf in the den?”

“There too.”

“Did you do the routine?” She asked.

“No,” he growled at her. He hated the routine, although he knew that when all else failed it worked nine times out of ten. The routine was to try to remember when he’d last had the thing, check the pockets of the clothes he’d had on, revisit every room he’d been in and everything he’d done. It was annoying and obsessive, but it worked, dammit.

And sure enough he found it in the basement where he’d gone last night to get a crescent wrench to tighten the nut on the leaky faucet in the master bath. It was right there in plain view like it was waiting for him.

He laughed when he picked it up. He rubbed the little jade dragon between his fingers and thumb, kissed it on its nose, and dropped it into his left pocket.

He knew that Jeanie knew that it was more than a lucky piece to him. It was his self confidence, and he couldn’t leave the house without it.

He could go to work now. He stopped in the kitchen and kissed his wife on the top of her head.

“Found it honey, thanks.” He said.