FAR FROM HERE * PURGING

Far From Here by Nicole Baart - During a dry spell, I checked this out of the library based on it's pretty and clean cover. Oops! If you liked The Pilot's Wife by Anita Shrieve, you'll like this one, also about a pilot's wife. You'll know this girl inside and out before it's over, but do you want to? I didn't. So I skip-read it until the end, found out what happened, and was done.

And then there was less.....Last weekend, I had my last-for-awhile-I-hope annual driveway sale. Friday was beautiful; I sold a lot of stuff, and then it rained Saturday, so I had this weird day of occasional people stopping by between the raindrops to browse the waterproof things on a single table in the drive, and then perhaps step into the foyer to browse the books and paper/cloth stuff in there. Made a little bit more money, and this week I've been pairing down the leftovers, stressing about whether to save anything for the possibility of a friend having a sale in the next few weeks. It's getting better every day, although yesterday I took a load to the Salvation Army in Evanston on Kedzie. I've been going there as customer and donor since I used to walk by it on my way to the EL when I first moved here.
It was gone.
The entire block of buildings has been torn down, and something big is going up. It derailed me for the rest of the day. I loved that it was an easy and impersonal place to drop things off, and that it was a constant in my life. Good bye Salvation Army on Kedzie. I'll never walk your cracked tile floors again, smelling that funny thrift store smell which was never as bad at your store as it is at some others. Remember when I found unusual serving pieces to Mom's Johnson Brother's Feather pattern china? And went around to some other Salvation Armys and found even more? It started with you. And how about the time you had beautiful lamps and shades from Fredrick Cooper for $10 and $15? There was more, but not a whole lot. Still, it was my local and it's gone. RIP.