Two Heads Are Better Than One

“If you just had yourself a big stick, you could reach it.”

I am lying on my belly in the sauna at Hilltopia trying to retrieve my little plastic earplug case that’s fallen through the cracks from the top shelf. Of course, it landed in the very farthest corner of the sauna, underneath the shelf I'm sitting on and the one below me. It is completely out of my reach even with my belly stretch. Which by the way is hard. I’m wiped out after my swim and this exertion around plastic case retrieval is taxing!

But Stick Suggestion Woman is into the retrieval. Poised in fleshy majesty, her size DD bra half on, her 80 year old panties worn and drooping, she has been chatting with me about this and that when I dropped the case. “I come 6 days a week. I water walk for an hour. After my surgery it was the thing my doctor told me was the best……” And I’d nodded and agreed. Another convert to the pool.

“Yes, I love the pool,” I’d gushed in my usual enthusiastic way. “I never want to get out. And then when I do get out and come in here to the sauna, I never want to get out of here!”
“They might kick you out at 10 o’clock,” she’d noted, chuckling softly.
“Yes, but for now I just want to stay. It’s so nice and warm.”

“You’re homesteadin it!” she’d pronounced.
I didn’t quite know what she meant by this. Like squatters’ rights with vacant houses? But I liked it and just repeated the term back to her.

So, now here she was trying to help me retrieve the earplug case, which frankly, I could live without, but hell, I’ve got a story here, so I’m gonna continue with the action.
“Ummm….I don’t have a big stick, but….” I eye my swim fins. “I do have a fin.” I grab it and sure enough, I can reach the case with the tip of the fin. Excited, I flick it hard and then sit up, a little winded.

“Where’d it go?” I look around the sauna, the floor covered in wooden boards.
“It went under that board there, I think,” she points.
Crestfallen, I plop down. “Now what?”
Undaunted, she rises and waddles over to where I am, “Here, let me help you. We can pick this slat up and I’ll hold it while you get it. Okay?”
“Okay!”

She is surprisingly strong, lifting the large wooden panel up and holding it off the cement floor for me. There it is! I swoop down and retrieve it. Victory!

She starts to let the panel back down. “Watch your toes!” she commands.
I do. And we manage to drop the panel back into place.
“Wow! That was an adventure!” I exclaim.
“That it was. That it was,” she agrees.
“I never would’ve thought of using my fin if you hadn’t mentioned the stick.”
“Two heads are better than one,” she quips, settling back into her spot, sighing loudly as she tries to hook her bra.

“What’s your name, Dearie?” she asks me.
I tell her and then ask hers. “Vita.”
“Vita? Like in life?”
She stares at me blankly. “How do you spell it?” I ask.
“V-E-D-A”
“Oh, Veda. That’s pretty. Is it a family name?” I ask.
Shaking her head, she chuckles softly. “Nope. My mother had a hairdresser whose name was Veda and she liked the name so I got it.”

A hairdresser name inspiration? My niece is a hair stylist. I wonder if any of her clients will name their children after her?
I would. If I had children that is.

But today, it’s Veda and her two heads homesteading wisdom that inspires me. It's a good thing that I always carry my swim fins with me wherever I go. You never know when you’ll need a big stick, right?
Right!