<\/FONT><\/FONT><\/FONT>Last Thursday I had a medical appointment. <\/font>While I was sitting in the waiting room, another patient and I got into a conversation. <\/font>Within minutes, we were chatting about having grown up in Alabama; she in a part that I was familiar with because of visits to my grandmother. <\/font>In addition, I told her about having met a man Sunday who was also from the same town!<\/p>\n <\/FONT><\/FONT><\/FONT>In the course of the conversation, she told me about having grown up poor in Alabama (something I could relate to). <\/font>She then told me about her marriage. <\/font>When she and her husband got married, they borrowed $50 from one relative and a car from another relative so that they could have a honeymoon in the nearest large town. <\/font>At that time, jobs were scarce in the area in which they lived. <\/font>A popular job was to haul gravel in the back of a truck for a man who paid the drivers a fee. <\/font>With no other options available, her husband bought a truck and hauled gravel, along with many others in the area. <\/font>When it came time to pay the haulers, the man only paid a tenth of what he had originally promised. <\/font>At this point, there were car notes, gas and (presumably) insurance to factor into the monthly expenses which were originally based on a much larger figure. <\/font>In addition, she was now pregnant. <\/font>A cousin who worked for the post office offered to put in a word to help her husband get a job as a mailman. <\/font>He got the job, they soon moved and her husband started delivering mail. <\/font>Over time, as a result of his work ethic, his managers promoted him. <\/font>His final promotion \u2013 postal inspector \u2013 allowed them to live an exceptionally comfortable life far removed from the days of $50 honeymoons and underpaid gravel hauling. <\/font>The job required that they move around quite a bit and the cities she named were all places in which I had either lived or were near where I had lived. <\/font><\/p>\n <\/FONT><\/FONT><\/FONT>The family of three eventually grew to four as she had two daughters. <\/font>She mentioned that, growing up, her family had never owned a house but over time she and her husband had owned houses and she herself had sold houses as a real estate agent. <\/font>Her husband died some years ago and she said she missed him and wished that he were still around (they would have been married around 60 years by now). <\/font>Her daughters moved to different parts of the country ages ago. <\/font>Yet, the 76-year old woman I met was a vivacious woman who was looking forward to going through her scheduled doctors\u2019 visits that day, then joining one of her best friends for a girl\u2019s night out dinner and movie. <\/font>Before we said goodbye, she wished me luck in what I\u2019m trying to do. <\/font>I told her that, during our conversation, I picked up that she was in a place of contentment in her life that shone through in her personality while we spoke and that I enjoyed our conversation.<\/p>\n <\/FONT><\/FONT><\/FONT>Soon thereafter, my name was called and I was no longer waiting. <\/font>Yet, I could have waited and chatted all day\u2026<\/p>\n <\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/p>\n \n <\/font><\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last Thursday I had a medical appointment. While I was sitting in the waiting room, another patient and I got into a conversation. Within minutes, we were chatting about having grown up in Alabama; she in a part that I was familiar with because of visits to my grandmother. In addition, I told her about … Continue reading Conversation: The (Merry) Widow<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-quotidien"],"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":false,"thumbnail":false,"medium":false,"medium_large":false,"large":false,"1536x1536":false,"2048x2048":false,"post-thumbnail":false},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"pfspirit","author_link":"https:\/\/www.petitefreespirit.com\/index.php\/author\/pfspirit\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"Last Thursday I had a medical appointment. While I was sitting in the waiting room, another patient and I got into a conversation. Within minutes, we were chatting about having grown up in Alabama; she in a part that I was familiar with because of visits to my grandmother. In addition, I told her about…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.petitefreespirit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.petitefreespirit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.petitefreespirit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.petitefreespirit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.petitefreespirit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.petitefreespirit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":651,"href":"https:\/\/www.petitefreespirit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions\/651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.petitefreespirit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.petitefreespirit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.petitefreespirit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}