Sunday, August 19, 2012

from the porch


Well now, if you don’t call this a tough, tougher than nails posting day, I don’t know what would qualify. First of all, to give myself time, more time to write and also to align myself a tad more with the person at home who scorns neatness, I have switched to a biweekly (rather than weekly) farmhouse cleaning schedule (with spot checks for cat hairs and such in between). That bi-weekly cleaning moment fell on today. The still sore back made scrubbing the shower stall to a shine a challenge.

But wait, it gets more boring than that. I put on a ridiculous outfit of tight sweats and a petticoat type thing (because it was there, okay?) and set about to listen to hours of tapes. I had to do it and I had the time today to do it and so I listened and took notes. These tapes are only somewhat useful in that they let me do some fact checking in the text of my writing project, but I would be negligent not to listen to them (again – I’d already heard them some years back). So I listened. From the porch.


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In between there are the usual computer skirmishes and searches. (It’s very easy to misplace tapes when they’re actually not tapes at all but files on a computer and who knew which computer – turns out not this one, nor that one and not on the back-up hardrive and if you haven’t searched for stuff on your back-up hardrive lately, you haven’t lived!)


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And Isis came and went and the sun came and went and sometimes Isis and the sun came and went together...

And then I wrote some more.


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In the evening, we had a pleasurable hour with my daughter and her fiancée and that’s always a sweet way to interrupt a Sunday. They're tired, but don't let that fool you. They are happy.


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We eat out on the porch and it storms, briefly but violently and that makes me want to put down the (eek! metal!) fork and go right back inside, but I am surrounded by braver (and more realistic) types and so we persevere and here I am alive to tell you about it.

Eventually the sun does shine again.


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(Ed scrapes the bottom of the pan when the food is to his liking.)


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After, he and I are settling in to an evening of writing, watching, reading and listening to the animal upstairs (in the attic?) move around.
Can it chew through a wall? I ask.
I don’t know, Ed tells me.

I sometimes think that he’d like these things to happen, just so he can learn how to fix the damage.

It's a beautiful night out there on the porch. Inside as well.