A Christmas Miracle

Remember this?  Remember how Larry demolished a main living area of our home at the beginning of December?  Of course, you do, seeing as how that is almost all I have talked about this month.

Well!  Apparently my spouse works most efficiently when a deadline looms - a serious deadline, a "Hey, honey, I invited ALL the neighbors over to our house for New Year's Day!" sort of deadline.  Because the room?  It is finished.  In fact, by last Saturday, all we needed to do was paint it ("we" as in "Larry," of course).  That is, once we agreed on a paint color, a task that usually takes us several months to accomplish.

So we (as in "Larry") spent all Saturday afternoon running back and forth to the paint store and smearing different colored paint samples on the newly primed den walls.  Larry wanted a blue-green.  I didn't.  Neither of us liked any of the colors we tested anyway.  It was a discouraging experience, on a par with shopping for kitchen stoves at Best Buy. 

There were many cans of paint involved.

At 7 PM, we took a break from testing the newly fragile bonds of our marriage in order to attend an honest-to-goodness holiday cocktail party, held at the home of good friends.  Only, now they are VERY good friends, the BEST of friends, because - after we had entered their house and doffed our coats and poured ourselves some (very stiff) drinks - I walked into their living room to socialize.  "Larry!" I said, dragging him away from the bar to see what I had seen, "Look!  Look at the walls!"

He looked.  "That's it!" he said.

"Yes!" I agreed.

"What are the odds they remember the name of that color?" he asked.

"Not very good, but I'll ask anyway," I said, determined to put an end, once and for all, to our latest home renovation nightmare.  I scouted out our hostess and asked if, by any chance, she knew the name of the paint on her living room walls.  Because, really, that's the proper way to behave at cocktail parties...

"That's easy," she said.  "We just painted it this month.  Homestead Green, by Benjamin Moore."

And right there, folks, was Larry's and my Christmas miracle.  Like the "Gift of the Magi," only with a happy ending....