i am alone.

Maureen is not here. Yeah, yeah, i know, it’s only five days. But the last couple of nights i felt alone.

i cooked my own meals, i did that for about six years a long time and am…er, capable, but i can’t find anything in the kitchen. The kitchen is hers now. i am a stranger.

i took care of her cats. They like me when she’s not here. After all, i feed them. They like me to give them a little attention, but it pales to their affection for Maureen.

Last night, i was sitting in the family room with only my reading light on. i put down the computer and just sat there thinking, reflecting, something i am not accustomed to doing although it has become more frequent in short moments as i age. As i reflected on life, i caught a movement across the room. It was likely just a reflection from outside. i started to talk to her. She was not there.

i make the bed in the morning, something she does as i am always up much earlier. The first morning, i started making her coffee before realizing she wasn’t there. We talk and text several times each day. i’m glad she’s having fun but it’s not the same here.

Finally, i fixed the hiccup in my get-a-long. She’s coming back Sunday. i conjured up a memory, when i was single again in College Station, Texas. As my former wife and i were struggling to cut the ties while minimizing the negatives for our young daughter. i had bought a small home. After my day at the NROTC unit at Texas A&M, i would change into my running gear, put the potatoes to bake in the oven, and then go on a five-mile run. When complete, i would feed the three-legged cat and the Old English Sheepdog. Then, i would pull out the cast iron hibachi, prep it with charcoal, light it, and close it for the funnel effect to get the coals roaring. i would take a shower, clean up, put the steak on the hibachi and make a salad. Toast with butter and a glass of wine completed the meal. i was in a good place and didn’t know it.

So tonight, i did some modifications from about seven years of bachelorhood before Maureen and i were wed. i cut corners by buying a grocery deli potato salad rather than baking a potato. i was tired of beef, so i grilled a pork chop, with the jim jewell marinade, which will never be duplicated since i won’t remember what sounded good to me tonight. A salad, sautéed mushrooms and onions for the pork chops, Maureen’s incredible bread, toasted with butter completed the serving with a delightful zinfandel.

i still got it.

But i still miss her.

There aren’t many around today. Phones with cameras and the almighty web and cloud have. pretty much wiped them out except for marketing.

My paternal grandmother, Carrie Myrtle Orrand Jewell, had book of postcards, which surprisingly contained mostly postcards. Somehow, i ended up with it. Several years after my grandfather passed away, Mama Jewell moved out of the family on on East Spring Street and moved into my aunt and her family’s home across the street from our home on Castle Heights Avenue. After my grandmother had passed and my Aunt Naomi Martin was in her nineties, the latter gave Mama Jewell’s boxes of memorabilia to her son, Maxwell Martin, my cousin. Maxwell, in turn, gave the boxes to my father, who in his mid-nineties gave the boxes to me.

The album itself has a spot on family room table. It has a padded cloth cover and is about 14 inches tall, 10 inches wide, and over two inches thick with thick, black pages holding the post cards. There a couple of pressed flowers inside. It looks like an antique. It is.

Scuffling around, i found four postcards that had fallen out of the album and ended up in one of my office piles. Unlike most of the postcards, these were not sent Mama by someone else. She apparently acquired them because she liked how they represented her home town, my home town.

Ahh, memories:

There were a lot of good things about those old days.