You can buy a purse almost anywhere, but a good purse is hard to come by. I searched for the perfect purse for years and accumulated fifty or sixty nearly perfect purses, you know the ones, with pockets and zippers in the wrong spot or too small or too big or the wrong color or shape but finally after sixty-odd years of searching, I finally found my dream purse. Three years ago. I bought it in Portugal, and it was made of cork. It fit every need with just the right number of pockets and zippers where I needed them and none where I didn’t. It held my wallet, checkbook, keys, pens, coin purse, phone, with extra space if I needed it. It had room enough for a packet of Kleenex, but not big enough to hold a full-sized mane tamer, which was okay because I still have beach hair. It was soft and pretty, too, and washable. As luck would have it, my dream purse fell apart. The straps broke, and it acquired holes big enough to push a penny through. I wasn’t about to get rid of it, so I took it to the purse doctor, who doubles as a shoe repairman, and he did a great job, adding rivets and a buckle and it was good to go. But all good things come to an end, and it bit the dust again, once and for all. Alas, I was in Texas without a purse. I used my pockets, but soon they bulged, so I emptied them into a plastic bag from Albertson’s to hold all my usual purse possessions until I could return to Portugal to repurchase my dream purse.
Headed back to Idaho, I stopped in a small Wyoming town, looking for ice cream, which wasn’t on my 2022 resolution diet, but after all, I was traveling and sometimes you need a treat. I didn’t find an ice cream store but found an interesting rope and saddle store. I have never owned a saddle and didn’t know that there were different kinds of rope, but this store had plenty of both. The store smelled like leather and was wedged between two different streets with all kinds of cowboy stuff, when suddenly I eyed a display of bags tossed in a corner, and I thought, “What If?”
Oh, my gosh, the purse of my dreams was displayed, nearly identical to the Portuguese cork purse of three years ago and it was, get this: ON SALE. Not much on sale, but better than a kick in the pants and it didn’t require a trip to Lisbon.
The moral to my blog is that sometimes we find the best things in those places where we least expect them. I never found the ice cream store, but it wasn’t on my diet anyway.
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