Total pages in book: 88
Estimated words: 83281 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 416(@200wpm)___ 333(@250wpm)___ 278(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 83281 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 416(@200wpm)___ 333(@250wpm)___ 278(@300wpm)
I only tried to have sex once or twice before I gave up—it was excruciating and embarrassing and I kept feeling like I was going to have a panic attack the minute the guy tried to put it in me. So it seemed like I was destined to remain a virgin—at least, technically—for life.
My lack of a sex life used to worry me a lot, but that was before my Mom got sick with cancer.
After she was diagnosed I had no time to worry about myself—I spent almost all my free time caring for her. And since she finally passed two years ago, I hadn’t had the heart to try to find anyone to be with.
For someone like me, making a romantic attachment involves a great deal of emotional work and frankly, it’s exhausting. Especially when I know the relationship won’t go anywhere because I can’t have sex. I mean, why bother?
At this point in my life, I had pretty much decided that it would just be easier to adopt more cats and become the proverbial crazy old cat lady. It might be a little bit lonely, but it wasn’t as scary and tiring as trying to find someone who wouldn’t get mad at me when I couldn’t give the waiter my order when we went out or have sex once we got back home.
Suddenly I wondered why I was thinking such depressing thoughts. Here I was in my new house and it was gorgeous! My only worry was how I was going to get my things from my old place in Florida. I didn’t have anything but my cell phone—all my clothes, my purse with my single credit card, and my laptop—which was the way I worked and earned money—were all back in my studio apartment.
I didn’t have a car—it was another expense I couldn’t afford, even though I hated riding the bus. But in my old apartment, I’d been living right down the road from a Save-A-Lot, which was a discount grocery store. And of course, anything I couldn’t get there, I’d been able to order online.
I wondered uneasily what I was going to do for money if I couldn’t get my laptop and also where I was going to get groceries. I seemed to have a memory of my Grandma canning things and putting them in big glass Mason jars down in the basement—was there a basement in the house that I’d missed? Even if there was, how long could you live on canned foods—especially if Winter was right around the corner?
My worried thoughts were cut off as I came to the top of the stairs and saw the upper floor of the house.
There were four rooms—two on either end of a long hallway—and a bathroom in between. The door of the room closest to me was cracked open. I stepped up to it and pushed it wider, revealing a bedroom.
The room was neat and I thought maybe it had been my Grandma’s. On the full-sized bed was a crocheted afghan in blues and greens and purples. There were needlepoint pillows on the bed with sayings like,
“The Rules Don’t Count in Grandma’s House!” and
“Grandma’s House is Home.”
In the closet were lots of old-fashioned dresses and also more cardigans. The shoes were lined up neatly in rows and everything had the faint sweet, floral scent that I had smelled on the cardigan I was now wearing.
There were some pictures on the nightstands of the bed and I picked one up and looked at it. It showed a little girl with thick black hair and pale grey eyes laughing and blowing bubbles. Another showed the girl pointing at something with a look of wonder on her face. Yet another showed her biting into a giant slice of watermelon which looked both messy and delicious.
“They’re me—they’re all me,” I murmured. I wished I could remember the exact memories the pictures showed, but all I got when I reached for them wass a blur of colorful half-recollections and the feeling of being loved and safe and happy.
After wandering around my Grandma’s room for a while, I checked out the room beside it, which turned out to be a sewing room. There were several sewing machines set up with projects in various stages of completion. There was a quilting frame too and plenty of yarn and needles for knitting and crocheting.
I wished that I could have learned to sew from my Grandma. Maybe I would take an on-line course or watch some YouTube videos and see what I could do, I thought as I left the room and went on with my tour.
The upstairs bathroom was beautiful. Like the downstairs it had black and white tile but unlike it, it also had a tub. It was a gorgeous old claw-foot bathtub which looked deep enough to submerge even a plus-sized curvy girl like me up to the neck. There were puffy pink towels in the small linen cupboard as well as a collection of bath salts and bubble bath.