Labor Day Weekend

This spring (was it for Mother's Day? My birthday maybe?), a daughter presented me with a gift certificate to a beautiful local spa where you can get a really good massage. She knows I love massages and can rarely get myself to spend the money on one. (The place is called Kneaded Relief -- you gotta love that play on words!) 

Here's a funny detail: exactly nineteen years ago, I was in the thick of my divorce. My ex was moving to Chicago and was anxious to set up his home there, and so when it came time to sell our house and clear it out of our accumulated belongings, he helped pack for a few days, but then he went back to Chicago and I was charged with offloading stuff and putting the rest into storage. It was a huge job and the only way I got through it was because two kind friends in the neighborhood helped me organize garage sales to move some of the bigger pieces out. But the small stuff, set for storage, and the final clean-out before the new owners of the house would move in -- that was left to me.

I wanted the new family to love the house. It had been the place where our daughters basically grew up. They had loved it with all their little hearts and I wanted that good vibe to be passed on. So in addition to emptying it of our stuff, I really cleaned the place well. It sparkled! When the new owners did the final walk through, the carpets were freshly vacuumed, the bathrooms were like new, the kitchen had not a bit of grease, not a crumb in sight. 

The new owners were so impressed and so grateful that together with their real estate agent, they sprung for a gift certificate, which they presented to me at the closing. It was for a massage at Kneaded Relief.

I put this away in my file of Important Papers and I let it sit there. My days were flooded with work, and with a move, and with, well, meeting Ed!

The certificate survived all my subsequent moves -- first to an apartment in downtown Madison, then to a condo, and finally to the farmhouse. (And here's another fun fact: the storage unit that I set up with all the stuff that I could not sell but also could not toss, because it included mementos that were really not mine but my daughters' and my ex-husband's, only last week was finally emptied out, with the stuff finally moved to their various homes. Owners of storage units make a living off of others' broken and busy lives.)

Today, on this first day of September, I dug out my old gift card and my new certificate (marveling at how the one from 2005 was for a massage valued at $90 -- impossibly low by today's prices) and set out for a spa treatment. Actually it would have to be a super treatment of some sort because if you joined the two cards, I would have been flush with Kneaded Relief funds.

First, though, animal care and a garden walk.

And breakfast. One hour long today. I had to cut it short!

And then I biked over to Kneaded Relief.

Of course, as I had suspected, they would not honor the old card. There, in bold print, it said -- valid for a year. Not surprisingly, 19 years was a bit over the top. Nevertheless, I still had my gift from this year and so I let Mezi work some magic on my tired old-ish body, as I let myself drift into the lala land that floods me as I lie limp in the aromatic fields of wild rose and lavender.

You have to understand how momentous this whole morning was for me. A flood of memories, one leapfrogging over the next. And images of my girls -- so grown up now! One had just taken her two older kids to a Shakespeare performance at American Players Theater, the other is spending time with her husband and kids in Door County, where, coincidentally Ed is expected to sail into, right as we speak. Life is so full of coincidences!

Mezi was so good that I hesitate to use her name here, lest you locals will all book with her, rendering her unavailable to me for future massages. Still, I must share the good stuff so there you have it -- from my point of view, she was fabulous. (I do not require nor like strong kneading, but I do know a good tension relief massage when I see one.)

I biked back slowly, in a state of total bliss.

And as I biked I thought about how there are fewer and fewer pleasures left that are deemed totally healthy. Oh sure, exercise -- but not too much at my age, lest you wreck your knees or whack your back out! Wine, which I have loved in the evenings, now is thought to be the devil incarnate. Scented candles? You inhale particles. Flying away for a vacation -- destroys the planet. Soon they'll be ripping away my milky coffee in the morning and telling me to drink water. But maybe a nice, modest kneading will remain on the plus side of the health continuum? Friends of ours get one once a week and they swear by it. Maybe once every month or two is not a vice? One can hope.

Though I remain labor free today and tomorrow, I do have the young family over for dinner. That's okay. I could use some human contact in my weekend of free time. I cook a simple dinner, they come...

We eat on the porch...

And after everything is put away, I retreat to the couch, with a book.  Feet up, with that lasting mellowness that stays with you after someone has worked you over to a state of limp relief. 

One more day of this labor-free lifestyle! Though I should admit -- I'm not perfect at it. This afternoon, for example, I vacuumed the whole house, and cleaned out the refrigerator and pantry. Some habits are just too hard to break.