On the Pleasure of the Flow of an Afternoon in Good Company

Art on the Divide Gallery, Georgetown, California

Our Sunday morning didn't start out that way. With a pleasurable flow, that is. Although Hilda and I had both been absorbed for the last week and more in preparing for the opening party for my little art show, we were reluctant to begin the day. Hilda had been planning and preparing hors d'oeuvres, and I'd kept on adding to and embellishing the presentation up to the last minute. We were pooped. So instead of leaping out of bed on D day, we both slept in. Not with that pleasurable lassitude deriving from the prospect of a lazy Sunday, but out of reluctance to initiate a day that would take more energy than we felt we had to get it rolling.

But rolling was eventually accomplished, in that gradual but noisy fashion of a steam engine pulling out from a station, with the sound and fury of billows of steam, loud exhortations of puffing and chuffing, and eventually rolling merrily along fueled by its own momentum.

Hilda puts final touches on her creations while a
soft summer breeze wafts through the old building ...

A momentum aided mightily, once we finally managed to present ourselves at the gallery, by the other coop members. They pitched in by helping to carry and set up and fill in gaps. There appeared a bouquet cut from the gallery's own historic rose garden, the corkscrew we forgot, music, balloons, wine from home-grown grapes, and more snacks. And soon the day that we had been so reluctant to begin was merrily rolling along, impelled by the pleasure of good conversation in the company of friends, conversation the flowed the afternoon too quickly away.

... and the guests begin to blow in.