 …Continued from previous post: The following morning, Tuesday, February 21, Tom and I checked out of the Berlin Resort. But first, as it was a nice, sunny morning, we took a stroll around the grounds,    …stopping at the Children’s Village, the miniature play town, inside each building of which is a playroom, that our granddaughters used to love when we used to take them to the Berlin Resort every summer before COVID.     It’s been almost four years since we last took them here. I fear that if we took them back to the Berlin Resort again, by now they may have outgrown their once-beloved Children’s Village. But then, outgrowing childhood’s joyland is what children do. In any case, despite waxing nostalgic, we enjoyed our stroll.     After we checked out of the Berlin Resort, Tom wanted to stop by Lehman's, a hardware store he'd heard about located in Kidron, the next town down from Berlin. Lehman's was purportedly a strictly nuts-and-bolts, tools and equipment, no-nonsense old farmer dude kind of place where Tom hoped to find a scythe which which to chop down the winter rye he'd planted to replenish his garden. Lehman's.  My first impression upon entering Lehman's was, Oh, this place is cute.    My second impression was, ...but it does not look like an old farmer dude hardware store. Tom looked around and sighed. "The place must have changed," he said.  I agreed that, if ever Lehmann's was a dude store, it was now, indubitably, a chick store. And not the kind that farmers raise. Not that there wasn't any hardware to be found at Lehman's. No, there were a couple of aisles of tools and other work-related accouterments.  But these seemed more token items,  perhaps a nod to Lehman's heritage,   ...or maybe something to hold the guys' interest while their women and children prowled the rest of the store's vast expanse of appealing things.          And while the store didn't carry a scythe, which is what Tom had come there looking for, we did find it a hoot that there was a book on scythes in the book section.  I roamed around the store, picking up a few oh-so-cute trinkets for my grand daughters. But it was the kitchen wares section that really pulled me in. There was such an amazing array of attractive, unique and useful things.    When I came upon this row of egg beaters, an old-school kitchen tool that I didn't know even existed any more, I couldn't resist taking one off the rack and playing with it.  To my surprise, I gave the handle barely a spin, but the beaters took off and kept spinning, fast, with barely any effort on my part. Wow, thought I, recalling my mother's egg beater and the egg beater I used to own and occasionally used, stiff, annoying apparatuses that gave one's wrist a workout every time. But this egg beater was like none I'd ever used before. It spun like a dream. It was one high-tech egg beater. I had to have it. This little baby, I decided, was going to put my old wire whisk out of business.  I tossed it into my cart with the rest of my acquisitions,  I then headed for the check-out counter, where the cashier proceeded to ring up my purchases. When she came to the egg beater she stopped. "You want this one?" she asked. "This is the expensive one." "Oh?" said I, trying to remember whether or not I'd checked the price on the thing before tossing it into my cart. As I didn't know what the price was, I obviously hadn't. "There's cheaper ones," the cashier added, "but this is the expensive one. Made in the U.S.A." Now, I wondered how much an expensive egg beater, one made in the U.S.A., might cost. However much it cost, the cashier apparently took one look at me and figured I couldn't afford it. The figure that popped into my head was twenty five dollars. Maybe thirty. But no, surely not thirty. Twenty five. Or maybe twenty. Which I could certainly afford, no matter what this haughty cashier thought. "Do you want this one?" she asked me again. "Well, how much does it cost," I asked. She held up the price tag.  Hearing my gasp and, I expect, reading the expression on my face, the cashier handed me back the one hundred and sixteen dollar and ninety-four cent egg beater and asked me if I would mind returning it to its rack while I picked out a cheaper one. So, with a little pang of regret I returned the egg beater of my dreams to its rack and tried out several cheaper ones, all of which admitted on their tags to being made in China, and none of which worked like my dream beater. I'd finally settled on some decidedly inferior, but vastly cheaper model,   ...when my mate came up behind me and took from the rack the egg beater that I had just returned. He turned it over in his hand, gave it a spin,  ...then handed it to me. "Here, get this one," he said. "What?...no!" said I. "Aw, come on," he said. "Get it." "Oh, no possible way," I said, returning the beater to its rack. "Look," he said, reaching around me and taking it back off the rack, "I never buy you anything. You never buy yourself anything. You don't wear jewelry. You don't wear make-up. You don't wear clothes." "Yes I do wear clothes," I said. "You know what I mean." He again handed me the egg beater. "Please," he said, "take it. I want you to have it." And so I took the egg beater from him, returned to the check-out counter, and made it my own. And I've been greatly enjoying it,  As has my good food-loving mate.
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"TROPICAL DEPRESSION" BY PATTI LISZKAY IS NOW AVAILABLE FOR PREORDERAMAZON: HTTPS://WWW.AMZN.COM/1685131832 BARNES AND NOBLE: HTTPS://WWW.BARNESANDNOBLE.COM/W/TROPICAL-DEPRESSION-PATTI-LISZKAY/1142982760?EAN=9781685131838 BLACK ROSE WRITING: WWW.BLACKROSEWRITING.COM/ROMANCE/TROPICALDEPRESSION?RQ=TROPICAL%20DEPRESSION%20PATTI%20LISZKAY 
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"Tropical Depression"
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May 2025
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