Janelle wasn’t doing anything wrong. Well, OK, so she’d ditched school, but she was just sitting on a bench beside the river. Not bothering anyone. And this fat cop with sweat dripping down his face comes up and says, “What are you doing?”
Janelle wasn’t scared of cops, although she’d tangled with them a few times. She answered grudginly, “Nothin’.”
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“It’s perfect,” he said, and made a ceremony of carrying it to the refrigerator to mount it in a place of honor.
He smiled at 4 year-old Ethan, who had followed him into the kitchen to watch the ceremony of putting the latest art work on the frig. It was solid black scribble Ethan declared “doggie.”
He took down the solid black scribble from yesterday, the one Ethan named “tree,” and carried it to the art box where he saved all of Ethan’s drawings. Ethan followed him to the box, crutches thumping gently on the hard wood floor.
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A direct order from his Captain to stay away from the landing on Canal Street was the last thing Tom heard before leaving the precinct tonight. But he was putting on black clothes and a black hooded sweatshirt, preparing to head for the landing anyway. He looked over his backup weapons. Tonight, he’d carry an untraceable one under his arm. He secured a second untraceable one at his ankle and put a knife on his other ankle.
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It seems we’ve managed to give the planet an extreme makeover. The weather is nuts–tornadoes at unheard of times, cyclones destroying lives, forest fires fanned beyond control, bees nowhere to be found, and now we learn that flowers are 90% less fragrant than they used to be. The line about being fruitful and multiplying should have come with a caveat: but not too much. Or maybe it . . .
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“I’m trying to think,” he said. He leaned back in the battered wooden rocking chair that occupied his front porch, settling in to tell me a story. “When was the last time I saw that noisy dad-gum cougar up in the hills?”
He fiddled with his pipe and struck a big kitchen match. “Must have been ’bout five years ago, at least. I was up on Old Baldy hunting deer and I heard him yowling and growling. Caught a glimpse of him up in those rocks where he had his den. Gray haired as I am, that old cat. Looked like my granddaddy.”
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Each spring brings a wave of honey consumption into my life. Local honey. Not because I love the sweet taste, although it is good. Not because I need to add calories to my diet; I clearly don’t. No, it’s about spring allergies. Local honey helps bring the sneezing, sniffling, itching throat and burning eyes under control. Another measure I’ve reluctantly learned to take in the battle against the runny nose is to wash out my sinuses with salt water. Ew. I like the non-drug, old timey remidies because . . .
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I love that she uses her GPS system to mark the location of wild flowers she wants to return to later to see if they’ve bloomed. I love that she actually stops the car and gets out and wanders off into the desert a bit when she sees spots of color that might be wildflowers. I love that she’s learning how to use photos in RAW format rather than as JPGs because she thinks she can do more with them if she learns about it. I love that we share the same first name and maybe someone will mistake me for her.
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There were signs all along the elevated wooden walkway through the swamp: “Beware of alligators” in red letters every few yards. Yet I rounded a turn in the walkway and saw a mom posing her chlld for a photo on the back of an alligator below the walkway.
“Get up off of that thing,” I screamed. I ran to grab the child, bumping the mom out of my way as I ran. I got the kid, but she broke her arm when she fell. And that’s how I ended up in court defending myself against assault charges.
The judge. . .
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Who is the wind beneath your wings? A friend, spouse, parent, religion? Do you have someone supporting and encouraging you?
I’m not convinced that I do. I think I do much more holding than being held. This is not all bad, particularly if you’re the independent sort of introvert like I am. It helps if you aren’t prone to loneliness.
But there’s always an underlying foundation in every person. Probably put there by a combination of genetics and parenting. Or birth order. Or circumstance. What’s holding you aloft?
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Somehow cookie dough had become a test of her motherhood. She looked at the chocolate chip cookie dough, rife with uncooked eggs, and then at her 4 year old twins. Kelly, the bolder of the two, asked, “Can we have a bite?” and both sets of innocent brown eyes turned up to her, waiting.
She had to decide now, no deliberating. She hated decisions like that. Was she the kind of mom who let her kids eat raw eggs? Or was she the kind of mom who made them wait until the cookies came out of the oven, safely cooked to a germ-free perfection?
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