One: Shampoo

The other day, I listened to an episode of one of my favorite podcasts, The Moth, which is a collection of people telling stories live and on stage, with no notes.  Great stuff.  Sometimes funny, sometimes heart wrenching, always human.  The one I was listening to this week, by a woman named Lizz Winstead, started off as a humorous travelogue.  It wasn't until the end of her story, The 25 Cent Spa, that I was stopped still and humbled, as was she by her experience. She visited Morocco with two friends, and they found themselves trying to do something both genuine to the location but also comfortable to their Western psyches.  Thus, a 25 cent spa. You should really listen to it if you get a chance, but if you don't, what she came to at the end that while she and her friends were there to pay to have someone else scrub them down, the other women, the local women, were there to share intimate, caring time with each other.  They were bathing each other, washing each other's hair, sharing.  Lizz's closing line was that after this experience, she promised herself that she would only have female friends who would be willing to wash her hair.
Yes.  I'm on board for that.  Really, why would I share any more of my life with those that don't care about me enough to connect on that level?  Thank you, Jesus, for the gift of the women who I'm inviting to write with me on this blog, any one of whom I'd be glad to lather, rinse, and repeat.

Number 1

4. Turkey, avocado, bacon, lettuce, tomato, cucumber, carrot, hot mustard on homemade bread sandwich and two friends picnic high on a hill over looking Betsy Bay. 5. Loreli just ahead peddling her pink vintage Schwinn. 6. Gray-headed golf-vested Lutherans stand around in geraniums and swizzle "Lutheran Lemonade". 7. Bright purple-blue wild iris strain through a highway marsh. 8. Little fish leap like miniature dolphins to feast on evening mosquitoes 9. Michael, the autistic pianist, grins over the upright and bangs out verse 4 page 347. 10. Tom plays the Bagpipes against the sunset: amazing grace how sweet the sound. I once was lost but now I'm found. 11. Dorothy is 77 and she accelerates around the curves; her long pink nails grip the wheel and she makes quick quick adjustments that lurch lurch the car. I am happy to survive the outing to the Cherry Hut over in Buelah. 12. The same Orion lights up the sky over Lake Michigan and Jarabacoa.