I found a five-dollar bill stuffed under my bank card when I opened my purse to pay for some perfume.  When I turned toward the department store exit, I saw the clearance rack.

“I’ll only get something if it’s under $5.”

I eyeballed the wall of clothes slipping off hangars and started sliding the clothes to one side.

Too big, too small, a tear in yoke, nope, nope. I paused. A Calvin Klein sleeveless black pleather top with pleats at the collar. My size. I searched for the price tag: $4.30.

And so, the pleather top went from hanging in Macy’s to hanging in my closet until I stumbled across it this morning.

“That’ll go with this loud skirt.”

And it seemed like a good idea until I got in my car on this hot and humid day – one of the hottest July days ever on planet Earth.

The pleather – 100% polyurethane - clung to my back and kept all the heat and humidity close to my torso. The pleats around the collar ended where my cleavage began and became channels – nay – rivulets, pooling at the band of my brassiere.

I work in a space with a wall of windows I could hardly mop myself with tissues.

I got a mug of ice from the breakroom and tried icing my neck. Naturally, the melted ice water joined the torrents of sweat running downstream.
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I mopped.

A colleague saw me melting and suggested I wear it under a blazer—perhaps in winter when temperatures drop.

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We usually spent the 4th of July on our farm in Maine. Both my parents were World War II veterans, and our barn was painted to show my parents’ pride in their country.

The show hadn’t been 100% intentional. We ran out of white paint and the hardware store was forty-five minutes away. Mama’s impatience couldn’t wait to have the house and barn painting project finished.

“This way we’ll have a head-start on decorating for the 4th!”

Mama loved celebrating any holiday and life milestone, but she really loved a parade. The vintage cars – “We had one like that!”, the marching bands, “Think of the coordination it takes!”, the homemade floats, “I don’t know if that one will last to the end – let’s follow it to see!”
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Wisely, she did not care for clowns. During one parade, she left our standard poodle, Millie, and a still in diapers me alone on the curb in front of her parent’s house and a cavorting clown swung toward me, he quickly swung to the other side of the street when snarling Millie leaped in front of a growling me.
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When I was a young teenager, I was asked to ride in the 4th of July parade. It was exciting in at least four different ways: I got to ride the cutest pony in town, the cute pony was owned by a cute boy, I was near the front of the parade, and mama was, as always, cheering me on.