I smile to myself because, to Audra, anything above Highway 7 is ‘up north’, as if you’d suddenly encounter polar bears and penguins once you got past the suburbs and the industrial parks.
“All right,” I say.
“Wanna go check it out?”
It’s that or mow the lawns before my afternoon zoom meeting with my editor, so sure, I ‘wanna go check it out.’
After breakfast, we throw the dishes in the dishwasher and tell the kidling that we’re going out for the morning.
She barely acknowledges us.
Typical for fourteen.
We take my car because Audra’s tired of her car, after driving it all week.
As we drive over the overpass, she looks to check out the highway traffic.
It’s bumper to bumper and there are flashing lights way off in the distance.
“Poor bastards,” she says to no-one in particular, but glad she’s not taking that to work today.
As we descend into the valley, the houses start giving way to farms and stables.
When we first moved here, we looked at a house down one of these side roads.
Coming from a two bedroom apartment in the city, the fifty acres of hay fields that would have come with the house seemed enormously out of our comfort zone.
It was only years later that we found out that they were probably rented out to the neighbours and we wouldn’t have had to do anything.
The ‘Yard Sale’ is being held at the local fairground up there, inside the Arts and Crafts Pavilion.
I’m pretty sure they’ve had a 4H competition or two in there because it smells vaguely of cow patties.
“Pretty rustic,” I say.
We split up to check out the various vendors.
She’s been talking about getting a new coffee table, something “eclectic”.
I’m not looking for anything in particular.
Some one’s selling hot cider, so I grab a paper cup-full for a buck.
It tastes like someone threw cinnamon in apple juice and I look for a discreet place to dump it.
I’m about to turn around and go find Audra when I see it, in between a CD player and a toy turntable.
An old typewriter/word processor.
The same kind I had when Audra and I were first married.
Her first big gift to me, after scrimping and saving her coffee money for most of that year.
The one I wrote the first book of the series on, in that little nook in the apartment, overlooking the alley behind us.
I have no rational need for it now, but I want it.
It’ll go up on the bookshelf, next to my Dad’s old Underwood, which he wrote his newspaper column on and my Grandfather’s ledger book from the store in Scotland.
Audra rolls her eyes when she sees me walking down the aisle with it.
But she smiles.
She knows.
She remembers.