Wounded!

Thursday afternoon, Nicola called me and suggested I meet her at the Dollar Store in the Tinseltown Mall where we bought oodles of little doodads to play with, and then we went for a walkabout in Chinatown. We had the best day! It had started so dark and gloomy, but when we exited the Dollar Store, the sun was hot on our skin.

I went crazy in the Dollar Store. I bought some artificial roses—yes, I bought fake flowers and I love them. Perhaps I’ve “jumped the shark” because I also bought gold placemats, spectacular cloth ribbons with Chinese classical print imagery on them, a hand painted glass egg, fabulous little bags (for candy), candy molds, little note pads, a great hand-painted fan (again, with Chinese imagery) and pine incense. How butch am I?

We had no itinerary or objective; we just wandered. We had Ramen at the end of the afternoon on a quiet patio and shared a piece of pie in a Chinatown that is vastly changed from the one we remember from our youth. It was such fun. Oh, I also bought some great teal shoes; there are a zillion very chic boutiques now in Chinatown.

I did all that with minimal stuttering and neither seizures nor medications but when I got home, my left leg was swollen from knee to toes and it was red.

Last Tuesday, I fell and scraped some skin off my leg. I pushed the skin back into place, covered it with a large bandage and carried on. I don’t like bandages; I like the air to get at wounds so I wore shorts around the house but at nights and on my walkabout day with Nicola, I’d don a bandage.      

My friend Mike stepped on a nail one day and then, after a week with no symptoms, he dropped dead from septicemia. That has made me afraid of infection, so when I saw my leg after our walkabout I decided that this weekend would be about healing.  I am binge-watching Dicte on Netflix with my leg raised and with thrice daily anti-bacterial cleansing and I am winning. 

The young have no idea how much fun ageing is. Let’s keep it a secret.

Yes, I am smitten.