A Thursday

Okay. Well, I guess you guys DO come back and read my comment responses.
I'm very glad to know that. And let me add that if you ever want to make a further comment to a response- that's cool too. Like I say, I aim for it to be a conversation and as many of you pointed out, this does feel like a community and that feels good.

So good morning and we slept late for us and it's another beautiful green day. It rained again yesterday afternoon after a fine cracking thunderstorm. It came and it went but whatever rain we got is appreciated, we are grateful for.

I'm about to go take a walk which I have been doing regularly this week and it feels good. I have been a slacker for some time now, putting that as a last priority and I know better. I've been a regular exerciser for more than thirty years but sometimes I let it go for awhile and I always regret that but it's the way of it and I always start up again and it's a relief just to know I can stil do it- walk fast and hard for forty-five minutes, an hour. Whatever. My walk this morning won't be as much fun because I finished that James Lee Burke book and I was so wrapped up in his world. He is one of those authors where his "place" is as important as any character in the book and I remember when I had that real Yankee agent for my book and she kept reminding me that every time my characters went outside they did not have to report on what the sky looked like but reading Burke, I tend to think that I was doing all right with that.
Well, it's a damn moot point at this point but I am going to miss that book with its excellent narration, its wire-strung tension, its descriptions of how it feels when the earth needs rain and the rain keeps acting like it's about to make its entrance onto the stage of your world and yet, doesn't, and that heat, that constant longing for the reassurance that the rain gods have not completely deserted us, that our world can continue on with its desperately thirsty life.

Or something like that.

But here it is, another day and I'll start listening to a different book and the library is filled with James Lee Burke and I'll start going through them. I do this. I get captured by an author and I just read and read and read through their work unless it was a false flirtation and one of their books does something that pisses me off or doesn't do something that I need for us to continue in our relationship and then I'll move on. I used to read Burke but his violence put me off and I quit. Maybe I have grown up. Maybe I have accepted the fact that there is violence in this world and people who are evil and I can handle it better now if it is all wrapped in beautiful descriptions and longing and forgiveness. Especially of the self.
Who knows? Not me.

I am going with my mother to see her doctor this morning. Her doctor sees her in the clinic downstairs from where she lives and so that's convenient. She mentioned the other night that she desperately needs a hair cut. There is a beauty salon where she lives too (they have everything there- everything!) and I asked her why she doesn't just make an appointment there. "I am not paying twenty-two dollars for a hair cut!" she said.
I was taken aback.
"How much does your regular guy charge?" I asked.
"Sixteen."

I thought about the gas it would take me to go to town and pick her up and take her over there and then take her home.

Sigh.

Well, I'll probably be much the same when I am her age although if I am like I am now with my hair, I won't need to get it cut ever, maybe trimmed once a year. When we were at the library yesterday for that story-hour, I realized that every other grandmother there had grandmother hair- short and white. My own hair was still wet from the washing I'd given it after my walk because when I finish my walk, my hair is soaked from sweat and it's not short and it's not yet all white. I felt a bit like Owen- not really fitting in- and don't we all feel that in one way or another?

I remember going to a place on the internet back in the days when the internet was a much smaller place and it was a site purporting to help people figure out whether or not they were actually part-alien or something like that and one of the telling questions was, "Do you often and have you always felt different? As if you don't belong?"
But before I let myself get all wrapped up in wondering if I might, indeed, be part alien, I realized that if there are people who have never felt that way, I had never met one.
This reminded me of when I'd gone to the survivor of sexual abuse group for a few years and I'd walked in there feeling as if I were a unique individual with unique problems and by the time I left I realized just how much I had in common with other women who had been sexually abused and how I wasn't really unique at all which was fine. In fact, it's a good thing sometimes to know that. We may feel different but at the bottom, we are all so very similar in many ways, especially if we have all grown up in a similar situation.

Well, here are the chicks, not a great picture but look at those pretty faces, all with permanent eye-makeup to die for (dye for- sorry, really bad pun) and they are doing well and eating about fifty times their weight per day in chick feed.


I gotta go walk. It's important. And I know it. I walk out the kitchen door and I come home and walk back in it. A short journey but a good one and it suits me fine. Every day basically the same walk and yet, never quite the same experience.

Love...Ms. Moon