From time to time I drag old books out of my library and re-read them, and today I found a receipt in a copy of Warlock by Wilson Tucker. The receipt is for $3.08, and it bought me a half gallon jug of cheap wine, the kind with the thumbhole and screw cap, and it also got me a dozen Ho-Ho’s. From the price you can pretty much guess how long ago that was.

I specifically remember the wine, and the ho-ho’s and the weekend. THis was not long after being forcibly ejected from Marriage #1, and years before I met the Ogwife.

I was spending a weekend with a.. Well, a hippie. Not in the classical sense, of course, I can’t imagine having that nice a weekend with a liberal, but a girl with long hair who wore cut flowers and ate whole foods and such. I think she voted for Reagan, so I was safe. No, she was, for lack of a better word, an “earthy” girl, who lived in a cottage on an estate where her job was live-in caretaker for the estate-owner’s horses. I was between gigs, and had about $40 to my name, but she liked to read, so i brought a box of books for her, and the ho-ho’s and wine.

Her cottage was pretty much a room and a bathroom, snug but tiny, with a bare minimum of plumbing and electricity. It had an iron roof which made an intense din when it rained.

We spent most of the weekend outdoors as it was late august, and the estate was empty but for us. We lay on old comforters and wool horseblankets in carpets of pine needles reading and necking and playing various versions of hide-the-salami. There was a small standup shower just barely large enough for one, and we used it as often as needed, but we managed to just end up sticky and wet again in short order.

Sunday afternoon we opened the wine and drank from Buffalo China institutional coffe cups, the thick ceramic mugs too tough for restaurant busboys to break, and by late afternoon we had a warm glow going. We ate ho-ho’s and hamburgers and drank the wine, and the sun beat down on the iron roof. Around six, a wind blew a fairly heavy cloud cover in and we wrapped up the blankets and carried them inside, just as the clouds broke. I put the receipt into one of the books I brought, closed it, and we stripped down and stood outside in the rain. It had been a hot day, and the cool rain felt good. I stretched out my arm to feel the rain coming off the roof and was a bit shocked to find it warm- the heat built up in the old thick iron roof was heating the water. She felt it too, ran inside to grab a bar of soap, and we washed each other in the warm runoff from the roof. Water so soft it felt like the soap would never come off. then it turned cold quickly, and we rinsed clear, came back inside and toweled each other dry. Rest of the evening we slept on her swaybacked old bed, buried under a mountain of blankets still smelling of pine needles, read, and drank wine and fell asleep in one another’s arms.

In the morning she thanked me for the books and drove me back to my car in her jeep. A few weeks later she returned the books, told me she’d had a nice time, invited me to come again for a repeat.

I never did. It was so perfect, so insanely decadent, that it is the moment of my life I return to when I cannot sleep, or when I’m anxious. A moment in time without worry or thought for anything but reading and sleeping and lovemaking. Had I repeated it, it might have sullied the moment, and I feared to do that. Decadence is a thing of the mind. If you haven’t been there you should go. Even a day can change your life.