July 19, 2024

Missing Mandy

We woke up on Friday morning feeling energized and ready for the approaching weekend. Today, my wife needed to drive to her university in Durham, where she would attend a few classes and meet with her school counselor. The morning began, however, with a fresh cup of coffee on the couch, where we discussed a recent news report that showed the top U.S. cities that had the largest influx of people were all in North and South Carolina.

Outside, the weather was cool, and the forecast called for a cloudy day with evening showers, which was alright by me. Although my wife had to drive to Durham, she didn’t have to be there early, so she had a slower, more relaxed morning.

After drinking my coffee and feeding the dogs, I sat down to write. About twenty minutes into my session, my wife came into my office and, feeling a little sleepy, she lied down on the spare bed. Never one to miss cuddle time with my partner, I joined her in bed and we held each other while talking about random things. 

It was always fun learning something new about my wife, and this morning, the conversation turned to elementary school experiences. She told me that while in first grade; she was required to give presentations to the class. Some of these were quasi-debates, while others seemed to be more a practice of storytelling.

That was when I learned about Missing Mandy, one of my wife’s more memorable presentations. Missing Mandy, as the story was told, was a fictional friend of my wife’s who went missing while they were both in the first grade. She remembered little more than that, but it made me speculate about these presentations.

We both laughed; me wondering if this was the beginning of my wife’s long time obsession with murder shows. Of course, Missing Mandy was fictional and my wife preferred real-life stories. For example, the recent murder story book she purchased to read on the Kindle turned out to be fiction, and once she realized this, she put it down, never touching it again.

While my wife got ready for school, I went back to writing. A news alert popped up on my phone, informing me there was a global outage for security software used by Windows PCs. A bad update had rendered several systems useless. The software bug shut down some airports, making it impossible for them to print boarding passes. Some 911 emergency service lines were even down, while traffic lights in other areas ceased to function.

Earlier, I heard my work phone ding, making me wonder who was working at five o’clock in the morning. I checked the email, and it was my job announcing the outage. Fortunately, or unfortunately, the systems I used remained unaffected, and I worked the whole day without incident. Yay?

Before leaving, my wife came to say goodbye. I teased her about something and she cautioned me, commenting that Missing Mandy could have been a story about her childhood, or it could have been a parable about the dangers of messing with her. Was Missing Mandy really just a metaphor for a man that went missing? All those murder shows she watched had to affect her, right? I decided it was better to behave, a type of better safe than sorry policy.

The rest of the morning was cloudy with intermittent showers. Some of the rain was so light, I had to stare into the white sky to see if the raindrops were still falling. Other times, it rained so hard that I had to turn up the volume on my computer so I could hear people talking during meetings.

My wife arrived home just in time for lunch. After finishing up an email, we drove into Wilson, where we ate at La Rancherita, our favorite Wilson Mexican restaurant. I tried their deluxe ACP, or “arroz con pollo” which translated as rice with chicken. The deluxe plate, however, included beef, shrimp, and chicken. My wife ate a sampler plate that had a bit of everything.

On the way to the restaurant, on the main road from our house, we saw a box turtle on the road’s edge. I swerved to give it room, and we contemplated stopping to move it, worried it would get hit when crossing the road. To our dismay, when we returned home, we saw that someone had run over the turtle, even though it was still at the edge of the road.

We both felt sorry for the little guy. I felt like I could have intervened if I had stopped on the way to the restaurant. Even though my wife told me we couldn’t save everything, I knew she felt bad too. When we got home, she grabbed some rubber gloves and a plastic bag, and while I went back to work, she walked the mile round trip, and picked up the turtle that was still dying. She brought the turtle back home and after it died; she took its body and buried it underneath a tree. After, she went for a walk alone in the woods.

I got hyper-focused with work, and after hours of editing reports, I stepped out of my office to go make a coffee. When I opened my office door, my wife was asleep on the couch. She woke up when she heard me, telling me she had slept for two hours, while she stretched and yawned. 

In the evening, we sat outside talking between sips of cold IPAs. From the back porch, we could see a small fawn standing on the other side of the fence. This was probably Roku, who seemed to hang out in that area while his mother and older sibling were out feeding.

During our talk, my wife told me about some large fungi she found in the forest during her walk. She recounted the approximate location, where she had made an arrow with three sticks. She said there was a small white fungi that looked like coral, and if I kept walking in the woods to where the arrow pointed, I would find an even larger specimen. Then she sent me out for a walk.

I grabbed a camera with a flash and headed out into the forest. When I got to the area, I found the arrow my wife left me. Right off the trail was a beautiful white Sparassis fungi that looked like a piece of coral. About fifteen feet away, in the direction the arrow pointed, sat a more impressive specimen. It was the size of a volleyball. The brain-like structure was off white, with the edges of its folds a brighter shade of white that gave the structure more visual depth. I took several photographs before heading back home. 

It was a beautiful evening in the forest. I was happy it was Friday, and I was ready for the weekend.