Utterly satisfying and glorious week.

My dear friend Mary from the desert came in for nearly a week, starting Tuesday. I picked her up from the airport and we went directly to the beach to stay with Chip and Susie at their place. All my childhood, my family had a place at the beach in Navarre, Florida. Sometimes, when we were flush, we had a boat, once a beautiful Chriscraft. We lived on the Santa Rosa sound and either took the boat over to the island or, in later years, drove over the newly built bridge to the beach.

All this flooded back to me-- the beach vacation par excellence. Seafood for dinner every night. Long walk on the beach. Getting into the water and jumping through the waves. Hours reading curled up in a favorite chair. We added a yoga session. Even cooking was more fun: We decided, on the spur of the moment at the fish market, to buy scallops and to have Coquilles St. Jacques, the way we always had them at my parents-in-law's in France. We had to go in search of a recipe, since the one in my head was definitely fuzzy. So we made our way to the local used/new bookstore (a REAL bookstore! owned by a PERSON!) and found a recipe in a lovely old meats & main dishes cookbook from what looked like the 50s. $4. But the recipe I remember has the scallops in a pastry shell with a wine sauce over them, so we bought fillo dough and disposable muffin tins and when the time came, painstakingly brushed each sheet with butter, folded it over and over and fitted it into the muffin tin. Of course, in France, you can buy the ready-made pastry shells. The recipe I've referenced above calls for sauteing the scallops, but the one we found has poaching them slowly in milk for ten minutes. They were delictable! If I ever make them again, I'm putting more wine into the white sauce. It was nice, but not wineful enough.

The house-- I'm hoping for Mary's photos at some point, she was better about taking pix than I was-- was exactly what you want in a beach house. Everything you need and nothing more. Good books on the shelves. One set of dishes and pots and pans. Porches front and back, so you always have the shade. Rocking chairs. A hammock. An outdoor shower with a good clothesline for wet suits and towels. Bird-feeder. A sunset view over the marsh to the inland waterway. Binoculars ready at hand.

And talk, talk, talk. The kind of conversation flow that feels seamless from one topic to the next-- personal, complex, families, large philosophies and great fact-filled discourses on topics of specialized interest. Life, the universe and everything. Catching up after six years with Mary. Pleased that she and my newer friends could connect on such a real level, practically from the git-go.

We stayed an extra day, and stopped on the way home to tour the battleship USS North Carolina. Mary's husband had been in the engine room of a destroyer during the Vietnam War, and so now she is fascinated with those engine rooms and bunk beds, the ice cream parlor and movie projector, the various communications rooms. Three hours we walked around that ship. Then home, to outsource a salad from Harris Teeter and sleep.

Saturday, we'd planned cherry-picking, but it was an hour and a half in the opposite direction from her airplane, so instead we did our hair. We got practical identical cuts, beautiful and expensive from my hair salon housed in an old firehouse, and then colored our hair. George, our hairdresser, had said to me, "You need color. Today." I tried for platinum blond and got a creamy light blond I can feel good about. Mary went for dark auburn and looks lovely deep red.

My friend Carole-the-poet came over for a little while Saturday afternoon and the two poets got a chance to talk shop a little. Turns out they were both in Prague last year at the same time and didn't know it.

Then off to Cary, to spend the night at Bill and Louise's. They live about 15 minutes from the airport and Mary's plane was at 7:15am. An evening of eating cherries (bought, not picked) and ice cream, talking GLBT diversity issues (a subject dear to Bill's heart) and teaching and how to deal with bullying at school. And birds and travels and languages.

So why the title of this post? Because both of my friends' houses possess toilet paper that is more expensive than the one-ply puny stuff we buy. At Susie's, theirs was positively luxurious, and I realized that it is truly false economy to buy what we've been buying. Theirs can do with three sheets what mine takes a yard or more to accomplish. Every time I visited the WC, I was struck by how much NICER theirs is than ours. Change is coming to the Llorens-Perkins household! Bet on it.

I did check out the price of a spot in the RV park. High season: $329 a WEEK. Off season: $187 a week. Guess we'll keep hanging out in the back yard. But with different toilet paper!