Places

First of all, MASSIVE THANKS to all you wonderful readers, whether or not you have made yourself known (of course, if you haven't made yourself known there's a chance you don't exist and I am inventing you out of my legendary vanity, or that you exist and are not wonderful, but let's, for the sake of making this thank you as grandiose as possible, assume you do and are). It is bringing me great joy and excitement to write out little ditties for public consumption, and that joy and excitement are quadrupled (minimum, respectively) every time I hear from someone or just imagine someone reading these ramblings. So, thank you thank you thank you.

Now, on to the ramblings...

I get places stuck in my head like songs, sometimes. Does this happen to anyone else? It's always happened to me on and off, but it seems like it's been on, lately, extra on. Places are stuck in my head all the time these days, for reasons I really can't guess, and there's a trend, too, that I never noticed before: the same actual places triggering the same head places. An example: for the past I don't even know how many times I've "come to rest" in savasana - that pose at the end of yoga where you lie on the floor and try to do and think nothing - I don't just not think nothing, as is my wont, but I find myself envisioning Thornes, the homey-yet-upscale little shopping complex in Northampton, MA, where my friends and I used to go in college to look wistfully at things we couldn't afford. And not just a general picture of Thornes, either, no, once entering the place my mind goes straight to Herrell's, the ice cream shop around the back on the street level where they hand-chopped candy bars to smush into your hand-made ice cream on a marble countertop - like Coldstone but before Coldstone.

I realize as I write this how few times I treated myself to this deliciousness, even when with friends who did, and that the reason was that I was always trying to avoid my one true addiction - sugar - a practice that I maintain to this day, as unsuccessfully now as I did back then. It is truly bizarre to me that I have been able to successfully avoid Mr. Softee for two summers running now and yet succumb to eating donuts nearly regularly. It is like I am constantly using up what I mentally consider my sugar allotment on donuts or, much worse, cookies or brownies left over from meetings at work, and have no room left for ice cream.

But I have been changing that this summer, indulging in ice cream more often because it makes summer SUMMER, even if most of June is rain. So maybe that's why Herrell's has been showing up in my savasana dreams. Either way, I'm sorry, donuts. I'll be back for you in the fall. And Herrell's, I'll see you in yoga.