People, places, and and the uncommonplace telling stories as they travel with Morganica (Cynthia Morgan) in mind and memory; neighbors, friends, and findings
"Guys, get in here and look at this cat!" The room slowly fills until six or seven Delta employees are peering into Ernie's carrier, smiling and cooing. "Have you ever SEEN a cat this big? And isn't he a sweetie?"
Gambles, especially foolish, futile ones, always steal a part of my heart. Even among spiders--the natural mathematicians of the invertebrate world--the golden orbs are something special. Not only are the spiders themselves beautiful, all red-orange, gold, brown and black, but their webs are immaculate geometric visualizations. Theirs are the storybook webs of Halloween. They spin them between posts and trees and walls and rocks...and sometimes cars.
Made a comment on Facebook that has resulted in "so you want to explain the "no underpants and 28 pairs of socks bit?" from a couple of folks, so... (Susan, you already know this one, you were there, so don't bother to read this...;-) ) A few years ago my friend Susan invited me to barge down the Canal du Midi. That's barge as in "large, RV-like boat with all the comforts of home and toilets that fill with canal water when flushing" (I didn't ask where they flushed, but had a sneaking suspicion that the highly perfumed canal water was brown for a reason).
This is Tarzan. He's coming up on his 22nd birthday. Tarzan's been a fixture at my neighborhood petshop since kittenhood, greeting customers, doing a little product testing and keeping the owners company when business is slow.
Yesterday didn't go at all well, so today I'm bright and early hard at work, whittling down my giant to-do list. Just now, though, I'm at Sawtooth Bakery, enjoying an inexpensive breakfast, buying bread and having fun peoplewatching.
The girl with angel wings cried, silent, fat tears that slipped down her cheeks and splashed on her pretty pink dress. She trudged just past me, plopped down on a bench and sighed.
Well, that's the last of the blueberries. Last Wednesday night I stripped all but the last few dozen berries off the bushes in back; I left those for the birds. It was kinda sad, even though I got two months of fresh-for-the-pickin' blueberries and shouldn't really complain. But blueberry picking became a welcome routine this summer: I'd work hard all day then, when shadows got long and the light went golden-warm, I'd pick up my little brown colander and head for the blueberry bushes out back. I'd spend a half hour or so tickling blueberries, gently stroking the fruit so that only the ripest and sweetest dropped into the colander.
It is--at last--a cool grey day in glassland, not quite raining but wanting to, sweet relief from the last month's desert heat. I'm on the way home from an afternoon of errand-running, partly to get things done but mostly to feel the back-to-normal, tad-too-chilly northwestern air moving through the open window of my car. I pull up to the light only halfway in the world; my brain's musing studio tasks and content projects while NPR drones in the background. The reporter mentions the Cash for Clunkers program, and I finally notice I'm behind a clunker.
I'm moving through Powell's big downtown bookstore in a wierdly dreamy, deja vu kinda way, strolling the stacks and digesting the day I've had so far: making art, viewing art, and needing art...or rather needing to get real artistic, real fast, to make sure Ernie Monstrocat has a GOOD home.
I think the birds put out a contract on me. Warnings haven't worked, and they've decided it's time for more drastic action. And fast--before blueberry season is over. You see, I've developed a real taste for the blueberries ripening in my backyard--four bushes' worth of gloriously huge, sweet berries. The birds tell me they have prior claim and they've been waiting all summer for their berries to ripen...just as I horn in. Worse still, I'm taking all the ripe ones, and making big, smacking "mmmmmmmmm" noises when I do it.
