How can one desk absorb an echo? One chair muffle the sound of space? Of emptiness? I tiptoed around the room as if I might wake a baby, my once soft steps became cavernous without wood and pulp to grab hold of them.
All that’s left in my writing room is a broom, a vacuum and a metal hanger.
Did you know plastic milk jugs give you cancer?
That’s what my mom thinks, she’s probably right, so today I drove up to Hillside Farms, a small organic compound with cows and horses and flowers where you can buy milk and vegetables sowed right before your very eyes. I took her there on her last visit and she asked if before I left, could I bring her two half-gallon glass milk jugs, they still use the old-tyme ones like Leave it to Beaver, because the glass ones don’t give you cancer, according to mom, and who wants cancer?
It’s my goal is to drink a gallon of organic skim milk in 5 days. Because I’m not traveling across the country with milk. Between me and Pat this is totally do-able. We could down a half-gallon in a day with the right chocolate chip cookies. If I had butter I’d make some to kick-start our binge.
This had a point when I started it 3 hours ago, but now I’m stuck here at work and in and out of this post designing pages, then coming back to write. My apologies.
I guess my point 3 hours ago was that I’m never going back to that “milk your own cow” farm, at least not for a very long time. I’m not passing my old friend’s street on Wyoming Ave. anymore. I’m not going over the Market St. bridge with it’s stately eagles guarding like gargoyles.
I remember driving into this valley having come from a dry, flat, dusty Texas town and thinking: This is more like it! The green tuft hills, the river glittering like lost change. I had no idea what I was getting into. And you readers here only know the half of it. The other half, the secret half is protected in me and will come out in writing years later. So maybe you’ll see it. Maybe it’s not really that protected in my anyway? Maybe you’ll see through it or make your own conclusions? Maybe I’ll disappear from it and you’ll see yourself? My life here has a story, a damn good story that I hope to tell someday.
I’m leaving frays behind. Nothing is ever tied up in bows. Not poetry, not endings, not life.
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