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| Jenna laying out her peach harvest to ripen |
Friday, July 26, 2013
Thursday, July 4, 2013
Wet Weather Chronicles, part 1
Jill and Larry sat on the back stoop of their single wide. Larry fired up a Pall Mall stub that some guy in gold-rimmed sunglasses and a clean, white wife beater had chucked out a truck window into the thigh-high grass last week. As he puffed the rest of its damp nub, they both silently reveled in their luck. Ever since those weird people failed at their stupid attempt to paint the singlewide like a log cabin and make it into a mountain retreat, the place had stood empty and had acquired that stale, musty, abandoned mountain house quality. It smelled of mold and mildew and animal urine, but no raccoon that I ever met minded those things a bit. Jill and Larry were tickled as could be to have stumbled upon such a castle.
And stumble is literally how they arrived a year ago. It was a week to the day after their mother had died suddenly, electrocuted on top of a transformer to be exact. Jill and Larry were shell shocked, young from a freakishly late in the season birth into a wet Appalchian summer. They were too young to be left alone, not yet weaned from their mother's teats and untrained in hunting and foraging for themselves. Either because of the trauma of the event or because of their young ages, neither of them acutely remembered their mother. They shared foggy shards of memories of the sonic buzz that blasted their mother into blue and white flames and the subsequent week of stumbling through the epic rains, cold and starving, just narrowly missing several flash floods. They don't remember arriving at the abandoned trailer or the unlikey feverish victory over a young black snake, which not only provided their first meal in over a week, but also eliminated the competition for the endless buffet of small rodents and other critters thriving in the vicinity.
Now, a year later, they sat, fat and comfortable, listening to a distant rumble and watching the sky darken. Any human who might have happened upon them would probably have been amused at the sight, two overweight raccoons lounging around, one smoking a cigarette and the other filing her claws on a torn off scrap of sand paper. They would have assumed them to be a mating pair, although the truth was that due to the childhood trauma, neither of them was inclined to reproduce yet. And the truth of that was that, while all their neighbors were busy parenting their younguns this 4th of July, Jill and Larry actually found themselves quite bored. Fat and bored.
They had already gorged on the Rice's cat's food just before dawn, just for fun. They took turns- one holding off the wailing cat with a fly swatter, while the other demolished some of the Laura Lynn brand cat food. They didn't even like the dry, cardboard-textured sorry excuse for food- it gave them the bloat and mild constipation- but they found the mangy, cross-eyed tabby's effort to claim her territory just amusing enough to make it worth the trip across the creek and the quarter mile down the windy road.
After a somewhat gassy nap, they had entertained themselves for a few hours at the creek, snatching up crawdaddies and making them fight. When they got bored of that, they ate the poor fellers and lazily loped back to the trailer, escaping the wet heat of the afternoon in the shade of the crooked, half rotten back porch.
Larry deeply inhaled the last draw of the moldy Pall Mall. "Hey sis," he said, "Reckon it's 4th of July tomorrow." He leaned over his groin, snapping at a flea but missed. "It'd be funny as hell if we put up a flag. Sons of bitches wouldn't know where the hell it came from. They'd be ghost stories all up Sodom in no time flat about some tragic dead patriot haint puttin up flags on abandoned buildings."
"Hee hee, " snickered Jill. Though she was but 5 minutes younger than Larry, she looked up to him with as much adoration as a little sister could look up to a big brother. She fancied him a genius and knew that deep down, he relied on her approval about as much as he relied on the next meal. It just worked out that way. The two of them spoke surprisingly little due to the silent bone-deep comprehension of each other. They knew each other in the way that conjoined twins do, practically sharing a psyche.
A fly droned its way around the porch area. It landed on a little gash on Jill's back that she had acquired a few days prior while shimmying her fat self under a chain link fence. Larry dropped the cigarette butt, and swiped at the fly with his paw.
"Ouch!" Jill complained as Larry managed to miss the fly and whack her cut.
The fly buzzed about, and everything else was quiet for a few minutes. After the next rumble of thunder, Jill spoke, "You reckon Brice and them's AC in that Jetta's still out?"
Larry pondered a moment, "Yeah, I reckon."
"You reckon they prolly left their windows down again?" Jill asked. Jill and Larry had taken refuge in the Brandon's car during several sudden downpours in the past couple weeks. They learned from the scolding of his wife, Kristen, that Brice frequently forgot to roll the windows up when he got home from his daily trips out. Larry and Jill still hadn't figured out exactly where Brice went every day. His departures in the Jetta seemed to hold no kind of schedule or reason, and his returns, though always on the same calendar day, occurred at various hours of evening or night.
Larry looked at Jill a good few seconds before a big, classic toothy raccoon grin broke out on his face. "I see where you're going with this. As of about a half hour ago he hadn't left yet. I bet wherever he's goin we can find us a right nice flag and be back with plenty of time to get that thang hung. Let's ride, sis!"
It was mid-afternoon by the time Larry and Jill were comfortably hidden under the passenger seat of the Jetta in Brice and Kristen's driveway. Fortunately, as the groans of thunder became louder, the sky darkened and a breeze from the west drove some of the stuffy hot air from the car, replacing it with the kind of charged, cool air that preceeds a mountain storm. They had curled themselves amongst some clutter under the seat- a mildewy towel and a tee-ball jersey shirt. They folded themselves together to make a surprisingly small bundle of hidden furry softness, which would very likely go unnoticed by even the most observant of humans. Lying there like that, still, they waited.
It wasn't a quarter of an hour before Jill and Larry heard the house door slam and the sound of a female voice approached the Jetta. " You can just drop me off at Ingles real quick and I'll get a few things for tomorrow while you go deal with Farm Credit." Then a male voice, "Whatever. I just hope we miss this storm. I'm damn sick and tired of driving around with this AC broke."
As Kristen seated herself in the passenger seat, Jill and Larry stiffled groans. They hadn't accounted for the possibility of a passenger, much less a 9-month pregnant one. What was a tight squeeze to begin with became a nearly impossible fit. The mid-summer weight of mother and baby sagged the seat so low that the underneath seemed to compress the raccoon siblings to the size of opossums. Neither said a word, but the discomfort was tangible. They were both silently astounded that neither human could sense the presence of suffering mammals in such close quarters. Brice fired up the Jetta and commence up the pot-hole infested driveway.
That bumpy ride under the pregnant woman's seat in a tiny sedan riveled Jill and Larry's orphaned childhood in pain and misery. It seemed to go on FOREVER, and they were both sitting there squished into an impossible wad of raccoon believing that they were in the gruelling process of being smothered and crushed to death. Once the Jetta hit the blacktop 90 seconds later, the siblings found themselves not only alive, but relatively unscathed- Jill's tail had been broken and one of Larry's teeth had punctured his lip. He frantically attempted to lick the blood back into his mouth as it flowed, terrified that it would pool up and slosh out onto the visible portion of the floorboard. Of course it didn't, and in a few minutes the puncture had clotted. He thought to Jill, "Don't even be thinking about that joke about how I probably just gave myself rabies." She always made that joke whenever he accidentally bit his lip, which, he was just noticing, he did with annoying frequency.
The duo of humans and of raccoons travelled down the paved road with such relative smoothness that all four of them experienced the illusion of comfort and spaceousness. It was just about the time that Jill became aware of the throbbing pain in her tail and that Larry was starting to privately wonder if it was possible that he had indeed given himself rabies that Kristen suddenly let out a startling cry. Brice swerved as he exclaimed, "What the crap!!" He had been quietly daydreaming of a design to build Madison County's first eco-friendly putt putt course using only foraged and salvaged materials.
A warm delightfully scented fluid began dripping down in front of Jill's nose right as Kristen declared, "I think my water just broke!"
He was beginning to say, "Are you sure?" when Brice glanced down at the small pool beginning to accumulate around Kristen's Birkenstocks. Instead he asked, "What do you want me to do?"
Kristen was silent for a few moments before replying, "Well, I don't feel any different. Let's just go get the stuff at Ingles and you can do your stuff and we'll go back home and get organized before anything really gets going."
The Jetta rolled down Lonesome Mountain, cool breeze whipping the Brandon's hair and giving Larry a tickle in his whiskers. It was all Jill could do to refrain herself from lapping at the puddle in the floor. Suddenly, she was very hungry and thirsty. She wasn't sure if the whole flag prank was worth this miserable trip. Just then, Kristen yelled out in what surely must have been some sort of primal human pitch. "Aaaaaahhhhhrrrr!" Then she started panting like a coyote. A few moments later she howled like a wolf. Brice engaged the petal to the floor and exclaimed, "Crap! Hold on honey. Don't you have the baby in this car, ya hear! I'm-a get there in no time flat!"
A half hour and about 1,000 primal screams later, Brice screeched the Jetta into the Emergency Room drive loop, and as he was half lifting, half hoisting Kristen into a lone curbside wheelchair, Jill and Larry crept out of the driver seat and scuttled underneath some dense shrubbery nestled against the building. Once no one was around Jill turned to Larry and said through clenched teeth, "I'm gonna.." Larry interupted her, "You'd never kill me, sis. Now let's find us a flag."
And stumble is literally how they arrived a year ago. It was a week to the day after their mother had died suddenly, electrocuted on top of a transformer to be exact. Jill and Larry were shell shocked, young from a freakishly late in the season birth into a wet Appalchian summer. They were too young to be left alone, not yet weaned from their mother's teats and untrained in hunting and foraging for themselves. Either because of the trauma of the event or because of their young ages, neither of them acutely remembered their mother. They shared foggy shards of memories of the sonic buzz that blasted their mother into blue and white flames and the subsequent week of stumbling through the epic rains, cold and starving, just narrowly missing several flash floods. They don't remember arriving at the abandoned trailer or the unlikey feverish victory over a young black snake, which not only provided their first meal in over a week, but also eliminated the competition for the endless buffet of small rodents and other critters thriving in the vicinity.
Now, a year later, they sat, fat and comfortable, listening to a distant rumble and watching the sky darken. Any human who might have happened upon them would probably have been amused at the sight, two overweight raccoons lounging around, one smoking a cigarette and the other filing her claws on a torn off scrap of sand paper. They would have assumed them to be a mating pair, although the truth was that due to the childhood trauma, neither of them was inclined to reproduce yet. And the truth of that was that, while all their neighbors were busy parenting their younguns this 4th of July, Jill and Larry actually found themselves quite bored. Fat and bored.
They had already gorged on the Rice's cat's food just before dawn, just for fun. They took turns- one holding off the wailing cat with a fly swatter, while the other demolished some of the Laura Lynn brand cat food. They didn't even like the dry, cardboard-textured sorry excuse for food- it gave them the bloat and mild constipation- but they found the mangy, cross-eyed tabby's effort to claim her territory just amusing enough to make it worth the trip across the creek and the quarter mile down the windy road.
After a somewhat gassy nap, they had entertained themselves for a few hours at the creek, snatching up crawdaddies and making them fight. When they got bored of that, they ate the poor fellers and lazily loped back to the trailer, escaping the wet heat of the afternoon in the shade of the crooked, half rotten back porch.
Larry deeply inhaled the last draw of the moldy Pall Mall. "Hey sis," he said, "Reckon it's 4th of July tomorrow." He leaned over his groin, snapping at a flea but missed. "It'd be funny as hell if we put up a flag. Sons of bitches wouldn't know where the hell it came from. They'd be ghost stories all up Sodom in no time flat about some tragic dead patriot haint puttin up flags on abandoned buildings."
"Hee hee, " snickered Jill. Though she was but 5 minutes younger than Larry, she looked up to him with as much adoration as a little sister could look up to a big brother. She fancied him a genius and knew that deep down, he relied on her approval about as much as he relied on the next meal. It just worked out that way. The two of them spoke surprisingly little due to the silent bone-deep comprehension of each other. They knew each other in the way that conjoined twins do, practically sharing a psyche.
A fly droned its way around the porch area. It landed on a little gash on Jill's back that she had acquired a few days prior while shimmying her fat self under a chain link fence. Larry dropped the cigarette butt, and swiped at the fly with his paw.
"Ouch!" Jill complained as Larry managed to miss the fly and whack her cut.
The fly buzzed about, and everything else was quiet for a few minutes. After the next rumble of thunder, Jill spoke, "You reckon Brice and them's AC in that Jetta's still out?"
Larry pondered a moment, "Yeah, I reckon."
"You reckon they prolly left their windows down again?" Jill asked. Jill and Larry had taken refuge in the Brandon's car during several sudden downpours in the past couple weeks. They learned from the scolding of his wife, Kristen, that Brice frequently forgot to roll the windows up when he got home from his daily trips out. Larry and Jill still hadn't figured out exactly where Brice went every day. His departures in the Jetta seemed to hold no kind of schedule or reason, and his returns, though always on the same calendar day, occurred at various hours of evening or night.
Larry looked at Jill a good few seconds before a big, classic toothy raccoon grin broke out on his face. "I see where you're going with this. As of about a half hour ago he hadn't left yet. I bet wherever he's goin we can find us a right nice flag and be back with plenty of time to get that thang hung. Let's ride, sis!"
It was mid-afternoon by the time Larry and Jill were comfortably hidden under the passenger seat of the Jetta in Brice and Kristen's driveway. Fortunately, as the groans of thunder became louder, the sky darkened and a breeze from the west drove some of the stuffy hot air from the car, replacing it with the kind of charged, cool air that preceeds a mountain storm. They had curled themselves amongst some clutter under the seat- a mildewy towel and a tee-ball jersey shirt. They folded themselves together to make a surprisingly small bundle of hidden furry softness, which would very likely go unnoticed by even the most observant of humans. Lying there like that, still, they waited.
It wasn't a quarter of an hour before Jill and Larry heard the house door slam and the sound of a female voice approached the Jetta. " You can just drop me off at Ingles real quick and I'll get a few things for tomorrow while you go deal with Farm Credit." Then a male voice, "Whatever. I just hope we miss this storm. I'm damn sick and tired of driving around with this AC broke."
As Kristen seated herself in the passenger seat, Jill and Larry stiffled groans. They hadn't accounted for the possibility of a passenger, much less a 9-month pregnant one. What was a tight squeeze to begin with became a nearly impossible fit. The mid-summer weight of mother and baby sagged the seat so low that the underneath seemed to compress the raccoon siblings to the size of opossums. Neither said a word, but the discomfort was tangible. They were both silently astounded that neither human could sense the presence of suffering mammals in such close quarters. Brice fired up the Jetta and commence up the pot-hole infested driveway.
That bumpy ride under the pregnant woman's seat in a tiny sedan riveled Jill and Larry's orphaned childhood in pain and misery. It seemed to go on FOREVER, and they were both sitting there squished into an impossible wad of raccoon believing that they were in the gruelling process of being smothered and crushed to death. Once the Jetta hit the blacktop 90 seconds later, the siblings found themselves not only alive, but relatively unscathed- Jill's tail had been broken and one of Larry's teeth had punctured his lip. He frantically attempted to lick the blood back into his mouth as it flowed, terrified that it would pool up and slosh out onto the visible portion of the floorboard. Of course it didn't, and in a few minutes the puncture had clotted. He thought to Jill, "Don't even be thinking about that joke about how I probably just gave myself rabies." She always made that joke whenever he accidentally bit his lip, which, he was just noticing, he did with annoying frequency.
The duo of humans and of raccoons travelled down the paved road with such relative smoothness that all four of them experienced the illusion of comfort and spaceousness. It was just about the time that Jill became aware of the throbbing pain in her tail and that Larry was starting to privately wonder if it was possible that he had indeed given himself rabies that Kristen suddenly let out a startling cry. Brice swerved as he exclaimed, "What the crap!!" He had been quietly daydreaming of a design to build Madison County's first eco-friendly putt putt course using only foraged and salvaged materials.
A warm delightfully scented fluid began dripping down in front of Jill's nose right as Kristen declared, "I think my water just broke!"
He was beginning to say, "Are you sure?" when Brice glanced down at the small pool beginning to accumulate around Kristen's Birkenstocks. Instead he asked, "What do you want me to do?"
Kristen was silent for a few moments before replying, "Well, I don't feel any different. Let's just go get the stuff at Ingles and you can do your stuff and we'll go back home and get organized before anything really gets going."
The Jetta rolled down Lonesome Mountain, cool breeze whipping the Brandon's hair and giving Larry a tickle in his whiskers. It was all Jill could do to refrain herself from lapping at the puddle in the floor. Suddenly, she was very hungry and thirsty. She wasn't sure if the whole flag prank was worth this miserable trip. Just then, Kristen yelled out in what surely must have been some sort of primal human pitch. "Aaaaaahhhhhrrrr!" Then she started panting like a coyote. A few moments later she howled like a wolf. Brice engaged the petal to the floor and exclaimed, "Crap! Hold on honey. Don't you have the baby in this car, ya hear! I'm-a get there in no time flat!"
A half hour and about 1,000 primal screams later, Brice screeched the Jetta into the Emergency Room drive loop, and as he was half lifting, half hoisting Kristen into a lone curbside wheelchair, Jill and Larry crept out of the driver seat and scuttled underneath some dense shrubbery nestled against the building. Once no one was around Jill turned to Larry and said through clenched teeth, "I'm gonna.." Larry interupted her, "You'd never kill me, sis. Now let's find us a flag."
Sunday, June 30, 2013
Excerpt from "Dula Weekly," Volume 1, ep. 1
For Back-To-The-Landers Tony "Dula" Mary and Sheila May Mosser, each day on the homestead offers opportunities to expand their consciousness and behold the wonders of Life on Spaceship Earth. Amongst fairy flowers and organic vegetables, free range animal companions and clear flowing mountain spring water, Tony and Sheila tread with a gentle footprint on Mother Earth.
"My work as a dula allows me to not just witness life, but also to perceive it fully," Tony Dula explains. "I remember back in the 80s when I was a thug. I was like just waiting for that next train, man. I was so spiritually dislightened that I didn't even realize my yang was disrupted. It had been torn from me like the breast is so often torn prematurely from the suckling kindergartener- weaned before its time."
"My work as a dula has illuminated to me the miracle of repairing my disengaged yang through the engaging of my inner yin. If that makes any sense."
Typically, Mary's work as a dula finds him supporting mothers in the age-old business of bringing forth new life. Pre- and post partum, eco-friendly lamaz, lactation consulting, kegels- Mary's dula skills are finely honed toward those blessed moments before and after childbirth.
Today, however, Tony's work threw him a cosmic curve-ball, so to speak. And he caught it.
"Ever since the Year of the Dragon, I have been dedicating myself to expansion. Expansion in the sense of everything real, man. I'm going for a total Big Bang of the 7th chakra, man. My meditations have been crucial."
Tony goes on to explain, "When the supermoon happened and then like 3 days later Mercury went into retrograde, I knew it was coming. I told Sheila, I said 'Honey, it's coming. The lightening is gonna strike.' I totally didn't know how serendipitous those words would be."
It was a few minutes before 5 o'clock Saturday that Tony noticed the chickens squawking. "Those hens are normally so peaceful," he said. "Like Sheila always says, 'they remind us to believe in angels.'" As quickly as he could resurface from the trance of his afternoon meditation, he made his way over to his avian companions. What he found there was the essence of one of his mortal challenges- a raccoon skulking around the birds' enclosure, coyly devising an entry plan.
"We always find predation to be a real challenge," Mary admits. "We consider our homestead to be a sanctuary for all living things, and we speak to all mainfestations of Life here with equal respect. We have an agreement with the predators that they might walk freely upon this land, including in the house if they wish, in return for their honoring our No Kill policy."
"I fear that this racoon must have wandered onto the sanctuary from another territory."
Tony watched with practiced unattachment, his yin and yang forming an energy field of a figure eight. He picked up the hose and offered the raccoon and spray of sacred water to gently remind him of the non-violence pact. "As we all know, water transmits purity of thought," Tony explains.
But rather than heed the gentle reminder, the raccoon took an unexpected course of action. She scurried up the nearby power pole and in an effort to seemingly attempt to take refuge atop of the transformer. Moments later, there was a "sonic buzz" and flames of white and blue leapt from the site of the raccoon up towards the sky. The raccoon, in its moment of reincarnation, toppled slowly to the earth, and her body lay there smoking.
"I heard it all the way from the cage-free creamery!" exclaimed neighbor Rosemary Michaeux. "Our lights flickered off, and then came right back on- totally hit my psychic reset button!"
Sheila looked up from her work in one of the zinnia patches in time to see the fall of the raccoon and hear the thud as she hit the ground below. "I heard the sonic zap, and I thought to myself, 'I can't believe it.'" After she realized what had occurred, she was able to simply and eloquently explain, "It was Karma in action- right before our very eyes."
After allowing some time for the smoke to clear and the reincarnation to complete, Tony Dula Mary gloved up, and delicately delivered the electrocuted raccoon to her final resting place. The whiskers were singed into little ringelts, and most of an ear was burned off. Even the contents of her final "elimination" were charred. "I realized I was like midwifing this Karma-stricken creature into her next life. Far out!"
Later that evening a clutch of chicken eggs hatched out as the wheel of Life made another turn. When asked if he had any further insights into the events of the day, Tony winked, slowly shook his head and said quietly, "They don't call me Tony 'Dula' Mary for nothing."
-Starla Nigel is a freelance new age writer dedicated to bringing light to stories that are in jeopardy of remaining in the dark.
"My work as a dula allows me to not just witness life, but also to perceive it fully," Tony Dula explains. "I remember back in the 80s when I was a thug. I was like just waiting for that next train, man. I was so spiritually dislightened that I didn't even realize my yang was disrupted. It had been torn from me like the breast is so often torn prematurely from the suckling kindergartener- weaned before its time."
"My work as a dula has illuminated to me the miracle of repairing my disengaged yang through the engaging of my inner yin. If that makes any sense."
Typically, Mary's work as a dula finds him supporting mothers in the age-old business of bringing forth new life. Pre- and post partum, eco-friendly lamaz, lactation consulting, kegels- Mary's dula skills are finely honed toward those blessed moments before and after childbirth.
Today, however, Tony's work threw him a cosmic curve-ball, so to speak. And he caught it.
"Ever since the Year of the Dragon, I have been dedicating myself to expansion. Expansion in the sense of everything real, man. I'm going for a total Big Bang of the 7th chakra, man. My meditations have been crucial."
Tony goes on to explain, "When the supermoon happened and then like 3 days later Mercury went into retrograde, I knew it was coming. I told Sheila, I said 'Honey, it's coming. The lightening is gonna strike.' I totally didn't know how serendipitous those words would be."
It was a few minutes before 5 o'clock Saturday that Tony noticed the chickens squawking. "Those hens are normally so peaceful," he said. "Like Sheila always says, 'they remind us to believe in angels.'" As quickly as he could resurface from the trance of his afternoon meditation, he made his way over to his avian companions. What he found there was the essence of one of his mortal challenges- a raccoon skulking around the birds' enclosure, coyly devising an entry plan.
"We always find predation to be a real challenge," Mary admits. "We consider our homestead to be a sanctuary for all living things, and we speak to all mainfestations of Life here with equal respect. We have an agreement with the predators that they might walk freely upon this land, including in the house if they wish, in return for their honoring our No Kill policy."
"I fear that this racoon must have wandered onto the sanctuary from another territory."
Tony watched with practiced unattachment, his yin and yang forming an energy field of a figure eight. He picked up the hose and offered the raccoon and spray of sacred water to gently remind him of the non-violence pact. "As we all know, water transmits purity of thought," Tony explains.
But rather than heed the gentle reminder, the raccoon took an unexpected course of action. She scurried up the nearby power pole and in an effort to seemingly attempt to take refuge atop of the transformer. Moments later, there was a "sonic buzz" and flames of white and blue leapt from the site of the raccoon up towards the sky. The raccoon, in its moment of reincarnation, toppled slowly to the earth, and her body lay there smoking.
"I heard it all the way from the cage-free creamery!" exclaimed neighbor Rosemary Michaeux. "Our lights flickered off, and then came right back on- totally hit my psychic reset button!"
Sheila looked up from her work in one of the zinnia patches in time to see the fall of the raccoon and hear the thud as she hit the ground below. "I heard the sonic zap, and I thought to myself, 'I can't believe it.'" After she realized what had occurred, she was able to simply and eloquently explain, "It was Karma in action- right before our very eyes."
After allowing some time for the smoke to clear and the reincarnation to complete, Tony Dula Mary gloved up, and delicately delivered the electrocuted raccoon to her final resting place. The whiskers were singed into little ringelts, and most of an ear was burned off. Even the contents of her final "elimination" were charred. "I realized I was like midwifing this Karma-stricken creature into her next life. Far out!"
Later that evening a clutch of chicken eggs hatched out as the wheel of Life made another turn. When asked if he had any further insights into the events of the day, Tony winked, slowly shook his head and said quietly, "They don't call me Tony 'Dula' Mary for nothing."
-Starla Nigel is a freelance new age writer dedicated to bringing light to stories that are in jeopardy of remaining in the dark.
Monday, June 24, 2013
Everybody rides out the storm somewhere
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| Hopey sneaks upstairs to snuggle with the pink fluffy 3-legged unicorn during a particularly scary thunderstorm. |
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| Notice the body language and eye signalling in the above photos that reads: "Leave us alone over here on this rag rug." |
Friday, June 14, 2013
Perspective
Summer storm flares up my perception of danger. The elements are absolute in their dominance over the course of things here below. Thor has a strong say in things. The dark sky, the driving rain. The wind gusts with such force that we feel our mighty automobiles of steel and petrol wobble like cardboard on the road.
Old man Clifford, old buddy, tells a story of an real real old man who could read the weather signs in the sky. A direct contact with Thor- like they shared a walky-talky set. It was mid July and the old weather man told everyone to pick all their tomatoes, whether they be green or not, because it was going to come a freeze. Most folks wrote him off as a crazy old man over-heeding superstition. Clifford and a few others following the warning and brought in bushels of green tomatoes. Sure enough, it came a hail with such force that it shredded most everything in the fields. What was not dessimated by the hails was kilt by a thin sheet of ice over the tender green early the next morning.
Last summer I was driving home from my grandmother's house by the river when a mighty storm blew in. (Snap) like that. Suddenly. The wind blew a dead standing locust down across the road, and it missed hitting my truck by inches. It was a horrible place to wait out a storm, and several cars accumulated on either side of the fallen tree. Finally two other ladies in flip-flops and I hoisted the tree out of the way so cars could pass. The lightening was almost up our butts, and the driving rain was like a power washer of ice water coming from every direction. I woke up the next morning sick, the force of the storm having driven something either in or out of my person- it's hard to say.
When the rumble grumbles and the sky darkens and the wind whips the treetops on the mountain, it's funny how my perspective goes elemental. No more grass to mow. No more laundry to dry. It's get out of the way of falling trees and rivers jumping their banks and pray for mercy. Gather the children in the folds of your apron and watch the wash out from the safest place available. Talk pretty to Thor and hope for the best.
Old man Clifford, old buddy, tells a story of an real real old man who could read the weather signs in the sky. A direct contact with Thor- like they shared a walky-talky set. It was mid July and the old weather man told everyone to pick all their tomatoes, whether they be green or not, because it was going to come a freeze. Most folks wrote him off as a crazy old man over-heeding superstition. Clifford and a few others following the warning and brought in bushels of green tomatoes. Sure enough, it came a hail with such force that it shredded most everything in the fields. What was not dessimated by the hails was kilt by a thin sheet of ice over the tender green early the next morning.
Last summer I was driving home from my grandmother's house by the river when a mighty storm blew in. (Snap) like that. Suddenly. The wind blew a dead standing locust down across the road, and it missed hitting my truck by inches. It was a horrible place to wait out a storm, and several cars accumulated on either side of the fallen tree. Finally two other ladies in flip-flops and I hoisted the tree out of the way so cars could pass. The lightening was almost up our butts, and the driving rain was like a power washer of ice water coming from every direction. I woke up the next morning sick, the force of the storm having driven something either in or out of my person- it's hard to say.
When the rumble grumbles and the sky darkens and the wind whips the treetops on the mountain, it's funny how my perspective goes elemental. No more grass to mow. No more laundry to dry. It's get out of the way of falling trees and rivers jumping their banks and pray for mercy. Gather the children in the folds of your apron and watch the wash out from the safest place available. Talk pretty to Thor and hope for the best.
Tuesday, June 4, 2013
Man, oh, man
This is me, smiling as broadly as possible with my little mouth, holding a GIANT SIZED three-prong reishi (Ganoderma tsugae) that I found not a 2 minute walk from my kitchen door on the root of a dead standing hemlock. It's on its way to becoming a double extraction (extracting first in grain alcohol and then in boiling water) to serve as a health and longevity tonic for me and my clan. I admit, I am having a hard time taking a knife to it because it is so absoultely bizarre and stunning in its entirely fungal glory.
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
"The Thing" Resolved: It's a Boy!
After a six month gestational period of sorts with mysterious, "The Thing," a miraculous emergence has occurred here in this cove of many wonders. He emerged delicately, neon wings limp and crumpled, antennae alive and charismatic. The flippin' sweetest antennae I ever saw, their fern-like perfection tinted with a hue that resides somewhere over the rainbow, between 'mustard,' rust' and 'sable.'
I've been living with him in pupa form since November. I found his cocoon out in the yard in some leaves under the hickory. I brought him up to the house, and with some investigative worked deduced that he was probably a luna moth in the making. He lived in a box on the covered porch with some leaves and lichens for the winter, and I brought him inside a few days ago and put him into a giant 4-gallon Ball jar so that I could see him when he emerged.
With wings crumpled and hues popping, he chilled out in the Ball jar last evening while I showered and ate my dinner. I then gently secured the Ball jar into the passenger seat of my town car with the seatbelt, and we rode down to Susie and Todd's for a session of admiration. They too have been waiting for the emergence. Along with George "why do they call him Jorge?" Cooper, we shared a perfectly lovely, lightening bug lit cool mountain evening on the porch of the shack, nibbling on chocolate and watching The Big Lebowski. Just the 5 of us.
I got to give it to the guy. He must be hearty stock because after all that handling and being moved indoors and outdoors again and being put on the table to be watched bumping around in the cocoon all winter, he still had the stamina to complete full metamorphosis. When we got home late last night, I spent some quiet time with him, and ultimately placed him on the porch post just before midnight. He needed to hang like that for a while to let the blood fill his wings before he launched into the night sky. May he fly off into the hardwoods and find a special lady friend to help conceive. Good night sweet prince*.
* The sex of the luna moth was guessed by the large antennae and the yellowish green hue of the wings.
And while I am on the subject of hue, allow me to emphatically relay to you the neon effect of this handsome guy's wings! The neon pops! Bright dusty yellow shoulders make way for one of the livliest greens I have ever seen in the natural world, and the entire upper wing system is cloaked in a scarf of deep majestic purple. The lunar markings on the wings are aptly reflective of our night sky, with insinuations of the moon in its different phases.
I've been living with him in pupa form since November. I found his cocoon out in the yard in some leaves under the hickory. I brought him up to the house, and with some investigative worked deduced that he was probably a luna moth in the making. He lived in a box on the covered porch with some leaves and lichens for the winter, and I brought him inside a few days ago and put him into a giant 4-gallon Ball jar so that I could see him when he emerged.
With wings crumpled and hues popping, he chilled out in the Ball jar last evening while I showered and ate my dinner. I then gently secured the Ball jar into the passenger seat of my town car with the seatbelt, and we rode down to Susie and Todd's for a session of admiration. They too have been waiting for the emergence. Along with George "why do they call him Jorge?" Cooper, we shared a perfectly lovely, lightening bug lit cool mountain evening on the porch of the shack, nibbling on chocolate and watching The Big Lebowski. Just the 5 of us.
I got to give it to the guy. He must be hearty stock because after all that handling and being moved indoors and outdoors again and being put on the table to be watched bumping around in the cocoon all winter, he still had the stamina to complete full metamorphosis. When we got home late last night, I spent some quiet time with him, and ultimately placed him on the porch post just before midnight. He needed to hang like that for a while to let the blood fill his wings before he launched into the night sky. May he fly off into the hardwoods and find a special lady friend to help conceive. Good night sweet prince*.
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