Well, I wanted to write more about the snake hole. This week, the burnout is a lot, even after such a perfect experience over the weekend. I do keep dreaming about the snakes as some kind of leftover evolutionary energy around being so close to so many of them. I also had a bee dream, but not so much like all the awful yellowjacket ones I was having last year. More like what actually happened with the honeybees in the graveyard. But don't I talk about bees too much? 

It's raining and I'm tired. I was just about to try a run, but it was like the weather was holding its breath, waiting for that exact minute to let it out. This weekend, I'm going home to see my folks. I haven't been in a little while, mostly because I was a little exhausted from so much back-to-back family stuff over the spring. It will be nice to go down to the creek and maybe put my feet in, to walk around my parents yard in the full prettiness of summer, to drink wine out with my mom and listen to the coyotes talking.

Today was the day I somehow knew it was time to go get the bees. The alive ones are still safe and happy - even thriving - in their new home. But the 30 or so that died when the hive got fried by lightning and were still sitting dead and cooked, stingers out, in the struck maple log out in the graveyard... it just felt like time. Stinging insects are supposed to make good protection jars, and honeybees especially. Lightning-touched elements are supposed to be especially, wildly potent in spell craft. When I asked a witch community about it, they said it was a once in a lifetime kind of spell chance.  

I do feel comfortable working in Thornrose - balanced, at home, at peace. A tradition when harvesting anything out of a cemetery, or even passing through one, is to leave offerings of food, coin, flowers, or drink and cleanse yourself. When I read that, I panicked initially, thinking of how often I had taken things from there: a handful of yellow meadowlark feathers, a flush of edible mushrooms, violets to flavor and color a batch of mead, countless armfuls of deadfall firewood and cedar starter, a big weird green caterpillar, a perfectly blue eggshell - up until I remembered that I go there literally every day and offer 15-30 crows equivalent sized portions of meat, nuts, egg, and cheese. I bet I'm actually pretty covered in terms of offerings. Even so, I brought rose wine and black sunflowers from my garden and whispered "thank you" foolishly into the rain while I used tweezers to carefully place scorched honeybees into vials. I got two vials: more than I could use to make the most scorching, potent spell I've ever cast for a lifetime, so I'm going to give the second vial away to my local witch community. I know it's stupid, but when I was sawing off some of the wood, my saw got so, so, so hot. Logically, I understand it was the friction, but it still burned my fingers, and made me think of the remembered lightning the wood still held onto. The whole while I walked home, the patch of them at my waist seemed to smolder against me. 

I bet it's fine if I don't cleanse myself in any ritual way after coming out of the cemetery. I don't mind the way the ghosts cling to me, anymore than I mind my curses trailing along behind my steps, slowing my run. 

I gave myself permission not to go running today and instead enjoy the moody, cool rain after so much dry heat. (But wait, you say? I have an injury and shouldn't be running anyway, especially because I made incremental progress yesterday and shouldn't push it? Ahh, bad, bad. I'm always so bad.) I did collect my first harvest from the garden that could be considered an armload. Cherokee purple and pink Brandywines. Could anyone ask for anything better?

Gosh, it got so late, but I still have so much I want to say and write in here. Okay, tomorrow probably, because I still want to talk about the snake hole. 

 

Middle July: the hot underbelly of the year. The dry heat is making me feel so soft and quiet and think-y. I've been dreaming a lot; I have long, strange conversations in my sleep. I feel weirdly connected to the different pieces of my life, keyed into things in a way that has been otherwise hard to link up to. More like myself? Or remote? It's hard to know Having a running injury usually brings back in a lot of the static that a good hard run will clear out. Maybe I'm just in a weird place for it all.

Yesterday, I had a moment taking the dog out for his last, late night bathroom break. My little cat came, of course, and I was standing in my sideyard, barefooted, with my silly animals around me. The night sky looked almost dusty from the heat, but there was a breeze blowing, and it felt like sinking into a hot tub: that feeling of intense warmth but movement and current around my body. I thought about a thousand other times I looked up at this exact sky, and if anyone I knew was also looking up at it at just that moment. 

Roo and I used to have a thing we would say to each other when we were lonely weirdoes in middle school - same sun, same moon! - to orient ourselves and feel less alone. (Of course, it had to be the sun and moon as opposed to the same, certain stars because we were in opposing hemispheres and the sun or moon weren't usually out at the same time.) It's a very old, fond thought that I'm sure a million of other human beings across time have had. 

Woke up this morning to find that Trash cat laid out not one, but two voles and half a sparrow wing in a neat row on my front mat. The voles are the reason I think my sunflowers are failing to thrive this year, so ... thank you, I guess? I looked up the behavior, having never had a cat do this, and apparently she thinks I'm a family member - a particularly dumb one that needs help getting prey. I want to ask her, "is this about me not sharing my sunflower loaf bread last night?" 

 Whew. I had an... intense dream last night, and now I'm feeling a little out of it and distractible all day. At least it's Friday. I got a huge project dumped on me at work, but I just don't have the spoons to make a huge start on it now. I want to wander barefoot around my garden. I want to go out to a creek I love and lie down fully dressed in it. I want to daydream. 

Should be a pretty quiet weekend, though. A town weekend, which is nice. 

 A good day. I got in touch with someone from the internet who could help with the bees and we met up at noon. Meeting a complete stranger in a cemetery to go pry lightning-struck bees out of a Confederate mass grave was an interesting way to spend my lunch break. I've read about bee-keeping for years, but never had any hands on experience, mostly because I'm allergic to them and a little bit afraid of them, re: cursed, but this was a different experience than my yellow jacket nest encounters. They were so gentle, especially so for being blasted out of a tree, left with their whole hive exposed on the ground for a week while weedwhackers and chainsaws blazed around them. The guy didn't even use a bee suit to work with them; he scooped them up with his bare hands and gently trickled them into the box. I've never see anything like that. Just this plain, friendly old dad with his hands full of bees, being calm. 

It made me happy. That was all there was to it. Just someone from my town taking the time to come rescue some honeybees on a workday where honestly, everything else went pretty wrong. But I'm happy to think of those little bees, glad to imagine them winding up in his garden with the other hives he's rescued, and me, getting to see a little bit of it. I've felt so... tired and sick to death of myself lately. It was good to see something I had never seen. 

Now it's getting on toward bedtime and I feel extremely tired. I thought my running injury was over, and ran six miles Tuesday, only to have it all come crashing back, and now I can barely walk. That's hard for me, and I'm trying to keep my head together about it. I think it might be raining right now; I'm sitting on the porch and I can hear it clicking in the leaves. 

 All my life now is strays, and by strays, I mean the several hundred feral honeybees, their larva, and comb that I'm desperately trying to rehome out of a week-down tree.

 You can't be in your twenties again, but you can go to the same places, feel up the same memories, get drunk at the same bars. The neighborhoods are a little more developed; there are high rises now and more fast food restaurants. Everything is a little junkier than you remember. When you go to the weird, perfect, best bar, the graffiti you left there seven years ago has been painted over and replaced with new, different graffiti. When the sun goes down, you can take off your clothes, swim naked with your friends in the same ocean: as warm as blood and rich with sharks. That was my favorite part - the swimming. 

I'm tired. My life feels impossibly wide right now, like there's so much to do and so little of me to go around with it. I'm home in my blue mountains now and there are too many baby butternut squash in my garden, but no sunflowers or tomatoes. Isn't it funny how that goes, year to year? They all have such different characters.

It's going to be a stupid week at work; I can already feel that. I have to train my new C-level on part of my job and pretend that she isn't going to rank and misunderstand the processes, therefore undervalue them and probably diminish my department. I wish I had another day, just a time to be home with nothing much to do except sweep my house and cut back the morning glory in my yard. It really is a nice yard. 

 Bad microburst hit the neighborhood. I had to run out in the marble-sized hail to rescue my frightened porch cat and take her inside to hide under the bed, while the house shook and leaned in the terrible wind. Now, the neighborhood looks unknowable: trees tangled up in each other and the power cords, soil and shingles and broken leaves everywhere. The power finally came on at 6 am this morning, so now I'm writing this, and then, leaving town to revisit my 20s. 

 Today, I was in a pretty good mood. 

 Tonight makes me think of the summer after my freshman year of college, when I was waitressing this awful little seafood chain restaurant off of Rt 28 in Manassas. I hated that job worse than any job I've ever had,  even worse than when the guy hired me to do tech writing for my first gig and then told me that he just wanted a woman to talk to and had hired me to listen to his problems. Anyway, the night I'm talking about, the aforementioned summer after my freshman year, I had to work the fourth of July because that's what all people working food service jobs have to do, but I didn't really get that because I was a teenager. I remember braiding ribbons into my braids, hoping that people would tip me better because I looked cute and patriotic, and god, I needed the money. I was paying for the college. No such luck.

Anyway, I remember this awful shift. It was storming and nobody came in. I made like 30 bucks in tips - 30 bucks, and that was for a whole evening of work, including my hourly 1.75. I might've spent more on gas getting there. The experience of doing that, of needing the money desperately but wanting so badly to be celebrating with my friends and family, is why I routinely tip 30 or 40% now, even when I can't afford it, because shit, that job. I remember getting finally 86'd, passing the bar, and some of the other servers were drinking and wanted me to join them. I didn't have friends at that job. I had my manager and these two guys from Afghanistan who were nice to me because I was so stupid and bad at the job that I must have evoked some kind of pathos, and taught me a few words of Farsi that I can't remember. So of course, even though I didn't stay and drink, it stuck out in my memory - the smooth, fake marble of the bar, the dim lights, the stools. I remember being offered a shot - I didn't take it. At that point in my life, I was not the kind of person who would have taken a shot offered by someone I barely knew at a job I hated and that hated me.

I drove home in my antique, gray Volvo. All over Manassas, I could see fireworks and huge big banks of rolling gray smoke amidst lightning from the summer storms. I will never forget the color of the clouds, all lit up in different ways - storm light, firework light, sulphur and the color it makes when all of those elements combine. A few miles from my parents house, I ran into a DUI checkpoint which seemed so funny to me at the time. No, officer, I really haven't been drinking. A half mile beyond it, I remembered that I had actually been required to do a wine sample for the evening's offerings before my shift and I felt so guilty; I really wanted to drive back around and tell them. 

Anyway, tonight smells like that night.

 Sitting long hours this weekend on the porch, writing my silly story, with Trash cat in my lap or sleeping at my feet, just touching my foot with her paw. I've noticed how much she likes to be touching me when I'm out here. She's a more affectionate cat than I might have realized before. 

The weekend has settled out less busy than I had expected. I have the day free, and half a mind to go out to Falls Hollow and look for mushrooms, but I don't want to go into the woods alone just now. I feel moody and in need of a little distraction. 

 It's good to have a weekend in town, especially this weekend. For a place that was the crown jewel of the Shenandoah confederacy, a hot seat of succession and rebellion, historically, my town loves the Fourth. It literally throws a giant birthday party, and everything takes on a festival atmosphere leading up to a parade and huge fireworks display. Everyone is walking around and talking to everyone all weekend, all the shops are open, there's music, flags, outfits, all that bullshit. When it's time for the fireworks, I like to sit up on the guns - the real ones from the war - in the graveyard and watch. It feels so terribly ironic that I'm literally sitting on an implement of war against the federal government, on a hill that was an artificial construct created from the literal space of a mass grave of thousands of Stonewall Jackson's men that died in the Valley campaigns... and watch the display of explosive Union nationalism! 

I don't feel smug or anything - my ancestors were still mud farmers in Norway around the time of the Civil War. I don't mean to imply that somehow gives me a pass, or no skin in the game, especially with how much the reverberations of that war still impact our culture. I don't know if I've talked about this before - probably have - but I've been almost insanely consuming Civil War books. I've finished up the major summaries, the thousand page biographies, and now I'm moving into primary sources, which are harder for me, but very interesting. I like to read because when I read, I don't think, and my brain feels more and more like an enemy these days. Anyway, all of that is to say some of them - the Confederates in my graveyard for example, and I do have some famous ones over there - Hotchkiss, Imboden - feel almost familiar to me. They fought a war for a reprehensible cause, but I wouldn't dance on their graves on purpose. If there's a hell, it will swallow me up just the same as them.

Hmm, talking about the rebellion and celebration of a country that has just decided I have less rights than a corpse! What an ugly, tired, sad old woman I've become. 

At least my garden is very beautiful right now. I need to water it, pick flowers and arrange them on various tables in my home. I have a squash to pick: a lovely, yellow oblong. 

I haven't run for the last two days - more because I was dealing with various crisises than because I was resting my knee or shin splints, though both still hurt as if I did nothing and get no credit for anything. Yesterday it became very apparent that the little feral kitten I've been trying to bring back to health in the backyard had been entirely abandoned by its mother, so it was the rush to get food and water into it, to bathe it and clean off the millions of fleas, and ultimately, to find it a little home in town. All of these things were done, but they took so much of my energy. 

Forgive me. I'm sentimental this weekend, and nostalgic.