Date, headcount, food, drink, fuel for the trip into Threlfall’s, sundries.
Twenty-three gatherings between January 2021 and June of this year.
Nine thousand one hundred and forty dollars.
That is not a number I ever intended to look at as a total. I only ever looked at the rows. And then one evening in May I sorted the column and the total came up at the bottom and I sat there for a while.
Nine thousand, one hundred and forty dollars.
Our mortgage payment is eleven hundred and forty a month.
So on the twenty-first of May, I sent an email.
Not a rant. I want to be very clear about the tone of it because it matters to what came after.
It went to Solange, Nessa and Roisin. Subject line: 4th July — plan.
It said we’d love to have everybody for the fourth as usual. It said that as the numbers had got big, we thought we’d make it a proper shared thing this year, the way the neighbours do it.
