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Five Easy Pieces



Scrawling compulsively everyday, not enough time to tweak and primp these words, but I've grown accustomed to sharing and these are busy house moving days- this is like me saying, here, step over the cardboard boxes and let's drink coffee out of plastic wine glasses. 


June 29, 2012
Unfinished
Family Day.
After lunch, two dead palm trees are cut down. Baby sits naked in a bowl of pasta. Dog runs her rope around the bench and any other available legs. Boy is up the tree, bow-saw brandishing. Grampa Jim directs. There are pak choi flowers in the salad- edible flowers, my best kind. Scattered family gathers, comfortable on a selection of garden furniture, the six year gap is nothing.


June 30th 2012
Unfinished
Family Wedding Day.
Children we have seen brand new to the world; crumpled, tiny; they surprise us: hand us their children; walk down aisles in beautiful costumes; grow taller than us. Cousins at play on the bouncy castle here, while we say, oh, it will be their turn, scary, soon.
Stuff.
I’m sat in the passenger seat, looking in the wing mirror; now in the mirror, tired brain is rambling, things are backwards but someone stood in front of you, that can see what the mirror sees, how can it be that they don’t see you backwards?
Because the mirror can’t see you, idiot, I tell it. It is only reflecting. And it’s who, who can see what the mirror sees.
Brain slides out of my ear like a sulky blancmange.



 July 1, 2012
Unfinished
First Impression
The middle of the summer months arrives. It finds us preoccupied, busies itself making cloud shapes. I write the date on the minutes for the Instructors Meeting with a guilty hand. Yesterday I watched three quarters of the moon over a supermarket car park and no-one but me was looking up. Yesterday’s clouds were a whole other hovering planet of terrain and everything was alien. I scowled at an earth-slob dropping his cigarette butt on the tarmac. June was so distracting: is this how summer is? Is this how we are? The date is arguably irrelevant, since every day only happens once, and, likewise arguably, to give a day a name is to acknowledge the unique moment of it.

  
July 2, 2012
Unfinished
"How does one become a butterfly?" she asked pensively. "You must want to fly so much that you are willing to give up being a caterpillar." 
[Trina Paulus: Hope For The Flowers]
Ran through the high-sided lanes this morning; when the air is damp; as the wide awake hedgerows quiver and flit. Dog humours my pace. It is our usual route, only I follow the circle to the right: the hills are steeper upwards and the slight gradient of the flatter section runs downwards, so I struggle most at the start. Flowers sway, graceful, represent the ease to which I aspire.


July 3, 2012
Unfinished
Metal on metal noise of friction directs my car to the garage. My transportation method for the rest of the day is two boot-clad feet. Back along the lanes, under the rain mist, daydreaming of shallow seabed, the hedges are land reefs of curling green corals. House martins shoal past; they have a speed and a languor of motion that suits an underwater pace.  Work at our new house is kind of tidal too, I decide: after my lunch I will press forwards with it again. Dog leaps dolphin style over the garden hedge. This is how it is, in the dull weather, the bright lures of thought catch the real light of things.



Comments

unikorna said…
Lovely and enchanting friend I wanted to let you know I nominated you for 2 blog awards :).
Suze said…
'this is like me saying, here, step over the cardboard boxes and let's drink coffee out of plastic wine glasses.'

Or wine out of Styrofoam coffee cups? :)
Lisa Southard said…
How spoilt I am today- armful of awards and a Styrofoam cup of wine! Thank you beautiful friends :-) xx
I can relate. I'm currently stuck in an "un-move." We have a home to move to in New Mexico, but I have a husband having trouble with completion. Won't pack up the stuff that needs packing so that we can try to sell our 2 houses in New Jersey so that I can get to the house of my dreams. Making me a bit crazy. Please may I also have a styrafoam cup of wine...
Lisa Southard said…
Fran, of course you may, and a large one at that! And let's drink to the end of such frustrations!

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