I am happy.

Behind me in the house are two happy, healthy children.

One has dug the plastic pail of freezies out of the deep freeze and informed me that he learned a new way to open them if you don’t have scissors. His dad showed him this summer, he said. “Just use your teeth!”
It never occurred to him before.

The other is pouring juice, making himself a breakfast of nectarines and yogurt and cottage cheese.

Barney wanted to have a “family breakfast” today.
“What do you mean?” I said, thinking we do that fairly often.
“It’s when we’re all here and we all sit at the table at the same time. Not just me and you or me and Don. All of us.”

So yesterday I took a package of bacon out to thaw and said we’d make pancakes and ‘creme a sucre’ for them. Then we went to town (not about to have no Midol next time it’s needed, which is sometimes in the middle of the night) and I didn’t buy milk when we were getting groceries.

No milk, no pancakes.

Why have I still not bought a bag of powdered milk? Because I am cheap, and it seems expensive. I bet when you figure out how much milk a bag makes, it’s not expensive at all and I have been a silly bugger for a year or more, not buying it, waiting for it to come on sale. God. As if I don’t have $12 to spend on powdered milk that will last me at least half a year.

This is an example of old patterns of thinking, where I still assume I have to watch my pennies *so minutely* about SOME THINGS. (Then I ‘throw money away’ on mocha smoothies and ice cream sandwiches and pop and chinese-food smorgs.)

I buy the can of beans that is 10 cents more than the one sitting right beside it (Louise Hay’s idea, perhaps), just to reinforce the mental affirmation that I am prosperous, not a poverty-stricken pennypincher. Then I notice myself still doing these other things that demonstrate my old pattern of thought, my old belief, that I can only afford stuff when it’s cheap.

I was taught at age eight that going out on Saturday after receiving the week’s 25-cent allowance, and spending the whole thing on 25 red licorice shoestrings, was a despicable irresponsibility. They told me this after I’d done it, of course. I got the pleasure of a handful of licorice that lasted a while, and shit from my parents.

They were both born at the end of the depression of the ’30s. They are frugal folk.

***

Remember that pottery glass I put a picture of in here a short while ago? And that I have no idea how old it is or where it came from?

Last night I dreamed I saw another piece of kitchenware with the same kind of cracks netting the inside of it, and imprinted in it was the date it was made -- 1603.