we can only hope that I'll be frozen

I'm sitting at my dining roomtable in the damp light of my garden. I should say that I moved my original dining room table outside and replaced it with a much nicer one of solid wood that could hold all my weight and then some. So now here I am, sitting in my garden, at my lesser of two tables. Everything outside has exploded with the rain and heat and my inattention. I have more basil than ever. My tomatoes are tangled in my sunflowers. I have a little fiddler fern I stole and I thought killed from Isaac's farm spouting again in the mossy top of a crumbling clay pot.

I know I haven't written in too long. I've felt calm, mostly composed, if a bit out to lunch. I haven't been sleeping very well or very much lately. Today I was a productivity monster, cleaning most of the house, my body twice, every laundry, and the garden and patio while still having time for a lot of exercise, cooking, and some gallivanting.

I had occasion to google Thornrose Cemetery, a extravagantly beautiful antebellum graveyard about a block from my house. I like to run it, but aside from the perimeter, I don't know the mileage of the interior paths, so I thought I might find out and incorporate it into my route. There's this big grassy hill in the center of it that I often deviate to run beside because of these lovely, giant beech trees that grow there, about three-of-me wide.

Anyway, there's a monument to the Confederate dead up on the hill. I always notice it. There aren't markers, or graves, so I always assumed it was a sort of general memorial. A few times I've wandered up to read the inscription or sprawl out on the cut grass. My googling, however, produced a horrifying fact: my friendly little beech-tree hill is actually a mass grave, a mound filled out with the bodies of over 2,000 soldiers from the Valley battlefields.

I grew up in Manassas; I've always had a bit of a Civil War thing. I try to explain this sometimes to people and usually I sound like a moron. It was just so real to me there growing up, finding bullets playing in my backyard or hearing about how the Bull Run river, where I'd wade and catch crawfish, had once turned red, clogged with bodies. It's always felt personal: always present, real, mine. It incorporated into my childhood imaginings. So, I don't know, I'm not trying to sound like a sentimental dip about something that happened a long time ago that a lot of people romanticize. I am often not trying to be stupid, but am anyways.

But fuck, 2,000 people? Tonight, I tried to imagine 2,000 teenagers and twenty-something-year-old men standing in that small space and I couldn't, they wouldn't fit. It was a gruesome thought. You think of mass graves being something that occur in worse-off "other" countries: iron-curtain Europe or the middle east. I'm not trying to be political; it's just weird to think: there is a mass grave less than half a mile from where I sleep.

I don't know if thinking these grim thoughts made me run faster or harder. I had a good run. I saw a swan on the pond in Gypsy Hill park and a guy almost ran my own very breathe-y twenty-something-self over when I was crossing the road. It was warm and the air has smelled so good lately. I'm hungry and awake.

Fiddler fern baby

wyrd is strongest

After a weekend that could boastfully and dramatically be described as a 24-hour physical and mental gauntlet in blinding heat and humidity wherein I observed challenges and then systematically destroyed them with my body, I'm the kind of exhausted where you see ghost-shapes moving out of the corner of your vision.  But it was good; I feel proud of myself and childishly want to be praised.  I have eaten little and slept less. I even drank a whole "extra strength"  Five Hour Energy potion on the drive home to stay awake.

If I ever have those things, I take them in little sips over the course of hours like a weirdo. My mother raised me to believe that any kind of energy drink might just spontaneously kill you at any second for any reason, like a 2.99 gas station russian roulette,  so I mistrust them intrinsically. I've never just drank a whole one before today. But. I did. So now I'm house-cleaning with the feral, crazed intensity of the desperately tired but unable to sleep. Did all the laundry, vacuumed the whole house, scrubbed all the things. The bleach is stinging my little fingercuts. Mm mm mm. I am starting to feel Quite Bad.

I have this weird feeling about my little house, which isn't really part of the aforementioned bad feeling but worth remarking on or at least, I don't know, I'm finishing this paragraph. I feel like it's going away. I guess that was a thing anyway because our lease is coming/ has come due, and we didn't know that we'd renew. But the landlord hasn't asked for a new contract, and he had some appraiser by last week. I've thought for a long time that they'd sell this house out from under us, especially since the neighbor's house is for sale now. Or I don't know, maybe I'm tripping on 8,333 % of my daily Vitamin B12 and it's making me suspicious of everything. (oh God why did I do this) Anyway, it's something I'm thinking about as I'm cleaning tonight.

I really like the sound of the laundry machines running. It's an oddly soothing noise.

miles of mountains and I'll ask for the sea

Back from the beach/farm trip with lots of stories and some good wounds. Surely I will post more tales of various things soon, but in the meantime all I want to do is to put up some dumb pictures.  Of various birds. That I spent time with.

 

Wild baby house wren didn't like my trimming the window boxes. Later, when I was weeding, I looked up to see him at eye-level on the stone wall before me. Then he flew into my shirt and hung on with his tiny claws. His parents were screaming at me, so I tried to put him back into another nest, but apparently that already had younger birds in it, I guess a second brood, and then they were even madder. So I held out my hand, and he fluttered down into the ivy. Sheesh.

Wounded hawk got taken to bird rehab, but not before breaking out of its' box during the night, dragging one of my favorite skirts out of my luggage, and nesting in it. It was quite a surprise when I was stumbling around in the early morning dim reaching blindly for my clothing. Oh, that's not a shirt. That's a hawk. In my dressing room. For some reason. Thanks, Dad.

Very bad fledging swallows above my window. Around dusk one night, their mom swooped down so close to me that I felt her wings brush my cheek.

 

Enough horrible birds. These tomatoes were so good, I ate a few like apples during hot afternoons. And I don't even really like tomatoes that much.

 

 

 

It's amazing how good-sore weeding all day makes a girl.

come on, pilgrim

Sometimes I feel like such a dumb-ass cliche. There are a slew of reasons why from this week, but ready, shining examples are thus: last night, doing that thing that girls do in movies where they stand in their bedrooms in their underwear and swear and say "I'm getting so fat and I have no clothes!" out loud while pawing wildly through previously-folded perfectly adequate clothing and making a big, dumb mess. Today, I cried a bit, first in Target, and then tearing up during an episode of Modern Family I had playing in the background at work, in addition to actively seeking out Taco Bell food. Then I thought---oh, wait. Aren't I supposed to have one of those period thingies like, today? Yeah. Oh.

I don't know if I should stay in and make up hours or go have fun. Tonight I'm headed to Manassas, then tomorrow up for the long drive to CT. I love to go to the farm--it's one of my most favorite places, and I like the hard work. That said, it's been a lot of shifting around these last few weeks. This morning I was so happy just piddling around my house, getting ready in the dark.

I feel all kinds of wistful. I wrote a long post last night on some notebook paper, but I don't remember it being very worth typing out. I'd agreed to meet some friends for a drink after work, but they'd each had unforseen crisis, and I got the text after I'd ordered my beer. It was weird to sit in a bar and drink alone--even a crummy little coffeeshop hipster bar--lonely, and it made me think lonely, dumb things.

Better post soon with real things or at least pictures. I love a good picture post. The moon is moving into Virgo; what a relief.

I am not that much at work

Obligatory indulgent at-the-beach shot:

 

Yeah, I was totally sucking in. On leaving this particular little slice of idyllic pie, it was learned that said beach was the site of a particularly gruesome massacre. Oh, how I love these creeks and peninsulas.

The way its been going

Snips today, because today.


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One of my favorite things to do in the summer (when the water temperature's natural failing is more forgivable) is to take long showers. I know it's indulgent. For being a girl with very long legs to wash, I am pretty fast normally, which is one good thing about me. But in the summer, I lie on my back and stretch my legs up against the wall. Sometimes I stop the tub and let the water fill in around me: up over my stomach, loosing my hair, lapping at my throat. It's actually very hard to breathe like this. The water beads on my lips and I inhale a lot of it. I usually get tired of this before the tub fills, but not tonight.

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I got some good wounds this weekend. Mostly burns. Burnt shoulders, burnt fingertips. I was gathering wood for a fire at the lake when I reached into a patch of stinging nettles, which I should've recognized. I haven't gotten into any since the first or second time I was at Travis's farm years ago. I had forgotten what it was like entirely. I looked down and suddenly had whip-lines of little welts wrapping around my arms and biceps. For a moment, I had no idea what was happening to me and I felt light-headed and heart-racy.

Naturally, they faded almost instantly after--I don't think I more than brushed against it. I looked, saw the plant, figured it out. But the thing was, I couldn't believe I had forgotten so fully the experience of encountering it. I felt dauntingly empty-headed, which is also how I feel right now.

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I found these little adorable tiny flying saucer-shaped onions on sale at Kroger. They are cute and sweet, but way more trouble to cut up than is worth. Tonight I made them into watercress soup with lemon and ginger.

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A bad thing to find out during the workweek: the nice new mascara you bought is not waterproof, no, not even a little bit.

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I was thinking about my dumb showerbath description and it occurred to me how odd it is, the things I talk about in this blog and the things I don't. Lately, I've kept an uncensored log in my head and it's proven an interesting cache. What do I feel comfortable typing out? What do I self censor? Unsafe driving? Disappointment? Success?  Crushed expectations? Anger? I feel less comfortable admitting anger than I do almost anything, even embarrassing sexual stories from my youth.

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Actually, that's not a really fair statement, because I don't have that many really good embarrassing sexual stories from my youth, being fairly sheltered and generally inexperienced.

I remember this one time when I was eleven or twelve, there was this boy from the neighborhood who I used to play with pretty regularly. He was a bit older. Then, all of the sudden, puberty! Tommy Maddox.. He responded to our changing bodies by generally getting really mean toward me. He'd shove me, or try to put me down in front of the other kids, or go out of his way to construct these elaborate, cruel pranks with me as the intended target. I was pretty nonchalant back then about it all--there were plenty of other kids to play with who weren't also bug-eyed psychos. I didn't really get it, and I didn't much care. Maybe you see where this is going.

Then, one day, we were enjoying a rare playing together in some pine trees, when suddenly, the punk cornered me. We wrestled briefly (I was pretty scrappy in those days) and in the fray, he tongue-kissed me. It was pretty terrible; I mean, he was twelve. Still, it cleared up a lot of mysteries about his recent behavior toward me. I eventually threw him off and exited the pines, ruffled, but steadfast, plotting revenge.

But the thing was, he'd chosen his moment poorly. His little sister had lain in wait nearby to witness the spectacle. She began circulating the tale widely.

His reaction was pretty unchill. He called me down for a secret pow-wow in his basement the next day. He explained to me that he had "spun" the scandal of the pinetree makeouts by telling everyone that he and I had not actually kissed, but rather engaged in a mouth-to-mouth pine needle transferring experiment, and this was the version of events  I should repeat to people if I was interrogated by other children of the neighborhood.

Even at 12, I was able to see how stupid this was. I told him no. Then he asked if I wanted to try more tongue-kissing, but this time, lying down on the sofa like they did in the movies instead of via brawl. I declined this also.

 I'm not trying to hate on my boy Tommy. I'm more being self-deprecating about my quality of good youthful makeout stories about which to be embarrassed. I admired his pluck then and now. It's hard to be a 12 year old kid and try to figure out kissing, and I'm sure he grew up into a nice young man who is very suave at it. (I lie! He is still a bug-eyed psycho.)

I don't know. I don't really know where I was going with that. I'm not in a great mood.

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