Why Is Nothing Ever Simple?

J and I were on our way to Home Depot, a 45 minute trip, to purchase a new, higher (chair-level) toilet and some new floor tile for the cottage bathroom. My brother had generously offered to put down the floor. "Might as well get the toilet in at the same time," he told me. "No point in putting it in and then pulling it up to tile the floor. I'll do it all in one go." Oh, to be a strong man and have the  confidence and know-how to do things in one go.

Not that women can't do both - just not this woman. I could, however, choose the toilet I wanted and the floor tile. So J and I set off in her pickup to do just that. When I climbed in, she tossed me a folded piece of material. "Spread this over your knees," she said. "The heater is working but the fan isn't, so it may get a little cold in here."

I spread the cloth over my knees, pulled my hat a little closer over my ears to ward off the chill, and off we went. Not five minutes into our drive I noticed the window in my door was icing over. I glanced over. J's was doing likewise. "I think..." I began when J leaned forward suddenly. "I can't see so well," she said, scraping hard with her fingernail at the ice forming on the windshield. She looked at me with a wry smile. "Maybe we better go back and swap the truck for the car."

Nothing wrong with the heater in the car. "We're later than we meant to be," J said as we sped off. "We may as well stop and have lunch first before we shop." Eating always sounds like a good idea to me. (It was because of my chubby little knees protesting during a two a.m. visit to the loo that we were getting a higher toilet to begin with.) We stopped at a popular buffet place near the Home Depot and ate a leisurely lunch while we discussed tile colors, the weather, the state of the world, and how our bodies were betraying us into buying things like raised toilets.

As we stood to leave, J put her hands in her pockets expecting to encounter her gloves. Instead she pulled out two large hen's eggs. I felt my eyebrows crawl up into my hair. "Have they been in your pockets all morning?" I asked, wondering how on earth they'd avoided being scrambled given the way J clambered in and out of the truck and tossed her coat carelessly down on the bench in the booth when we came in.

She looked at me. "They've been in my coat since yesterday when I took them out of the laying boxes!" I thought of all the things J does in a day - heaving forty pound bags of grain around, rough

housing with her dog, shoveling snow, bounding in and out of the truck a dozen times, hauling trash to the transfer station - those eggs had been jostled and jiggled and bounced around. The thought of what might have happened if they'd broken while still in her pockets made me giggle, then guffaw. We left the restaurant poking each other and laughing like two silly school girls on a lark. The eggs rode safely home in one of the car's cup holders.

The tile and toilet have since been successfully installed. And other than J locking herself out of her car Thursday and me locking myself out of the cottage Friday, our recent days have been relatively event-free.