True Colors

June is my husband's birthday month, and it's just about over. We drove down to Martinsburg to visit with my mother-in-law, and she treated us to lunch for his birthday at nearby Traditions restaurant.

Traveling was odd. The air quality here was bad, but not as awful as in Pittsburgh; it was as hazy here in mid-afternoon as it is on any 100% humidity August morning. You might look out the window and think it was time for the fair.

But it's not. It's just the smoke from the wildfires in Canada. We feel like renters again, with smokers for neighbors in the apartment complex: you might not want to smoke yourself, but somehow you end up BREATHING smoke because your neighbors are smokers.

So we smoke against our will. And yes, I've been wearing a mask on my walks for the past several days, which sucks. But I like breathing and I like my lungs. A lot. So I'm doing my best to protect them.

We were out and about in the smoke on Wednesday as well, and I had a premonition of how our world will eventually be. I like to walk each day, but the air quality is a problem. I started thinking about going to a Mall to walk, indoors. Then I realized that someday, if the air quality gets worse and worse, maybe we'll ALL spend our days in big, indoor places like that, in some kind of weird, 80s-girl dystopia. But I hope not.

Air quality and all dystopian thoughts aside, I had the Thursday lunch special, which was a sloppy joe with two sides. I picked onion rings and curly fries. My husband had the meatloaf. Lois had a mushroom burger. Everything we had was good.

After the meal, we all wandered over to check out the gift shop, which is lovely. It has a whole section of sewing notions and yard goods; many of them in pretty floral patterns, lined up like rainbows.

As I entered the yard goods area, I spotted about a half-dozen lovely young Mennonite ladies, and they were animatedly moving through that section, looking at fabrics.

They were like Easter eggs; their dresses were all in floral pastel patterns, like the fabric that surrounded them, and I did take a quick, furtive photo, but it didn't turn out like much, which is why you aren't seeing it here.

I thought later that I probably could have simply walked up to the young women, told them how lovely - like butterflies among flowers - they seemed amid the fabric section, and gotten their permission to take a much, much better shot. In the online world, I'm quite brave. You might be surprised how shy I can be face-to-face. Maybe next time I'll work up my nerve.

I did stop amid the sewing notions to take some pictures of the beautiful colors I saw there. There were zippers and ribbons and bobbins galore, and this gorgeously arranged exhibit of assorted threads caught my eye. The shot turned out better than expected and so here it is. Some of my pictures are born with names, and this one has one: it's called True Colors, and that is my soundtrack song, by Cyndi Lauper.