Just some musings while I'm at the coffee shop

I've been enjoying my father's newest stray cat (he now has 3 outside and 3 in), who we've named Tom, as he is an un-neutered male. An orange and white tiger-stripe, he is by far the cuddliest of the 6, to me anyway. He wants to head-butt, drool all over me, purr, have his belly rubbed..... I feel a bit like I should have a cigarette when we're done. I'd really like to bring him home with me but he's in such good shape it seems like he must really belong to one of the neighbors. He certainly has no hint of "feral cat" in him. Also, I'm a bit worried about adopting anothe cat before I'm sure I have all of the Sabrina-pee smell obliterated from my carpeting.

I haven't been rained on since I left Seattle on May 16th, and the past couple of days here have been just stellar.... bright sunshine, 70 degrees. I've doing after-dinner bike rides of 15-20 miles on lovely, flat, low-traffic back roads. Yesterday I stopped for a brief visit with a couple that lived just down the road from us when I was a kid; they still live in the same place, and they remembered me. The first thing Fran said was "You loved my husband!"; Charlie's farm fields bordered the house where I was born, and I would see him out on his tractor and say THAT was who I was going to marry.

So many of the people I knew when I lived here still live in the same houses, or built houses right down the street from their parents. I stopped and talked to another couple who were just a year ahead of me in high school. They got married right out of high school, built a house just a couple of doors down from Candy's mom's, who still lives there. And Henry's mom and sister still live less than a mile away. Then there's my dad's brother, still living where he grew up in Standish, with his son and family, two grand-daughters and families, grandson, and a passle of great-grandkids (and possibly a few more I've forgotten) all living within a short walk. It's all such a different life from what I've lived.  I wouldn't trade my life for anything, but I do wonder what it would've been like. I sometimes think that that in one of my next lives I'm going to have 5 or 6 kids and be a farm wife.  One could do worse than to be my Aunt Gin.