Woot! 2 journal entries in one day while on vacation?! You lucky dogs, you 🙂
We managed to waste spend several hours at the mall today without actually accomplishing much…although the kids came away with some clothes and so did we (I cannot currently express my love for C.J. Banks enough). Mostly the kids had a ball playing like wild things in the playplace with the gigantic climb-inside fish.
Then we stopped by Meijer’s which is a little too overwhelming a store for someone who has been living in Sweden as long as I have, and picked up some groceries. My mom served scalloped potatoes (one of my childhood faves) and honey mustard-glazed spiral-cut ham for dinner. I managed to burn the shit out of my left hand at the beginning of dinner by grabbing the handle of the terracotta oven pan that held the potatoes because it was tipping off the hotpad. $%!#*% damn that hurt! 🙁 Luckily, Anders rushed my shocked and immobilized self into the kitchen and held my hand under freezing water for five minutes and then wrapped up ice into a tidy package for me to hold all through dinner, and I seem to have escaped unscathed. What a nice word unscathed is. I wonder if you can be scathed? (that looks too much like scat-hed)
Anders and Karin are riding the lawnmower tractor all over the place to her immense delight. My mom’s yard is H-U-G-E. I can smell the lawnmower covet rising off of Anders in waves. 🙂 Too bad OUR yard in Sweden, while large, is NOT large enough to warrant a riding mower. I can just imagine the reaction of the neighbors!
The wildflowers around here knock my socks off. Along every road and path is an airy tangle of Chicory and Queen Anne’s Lace. Spiky purple Loosestrife infests the ditches, braided in and out of the rushes and cattails. There is a peacefulness here that resonates in my bones. The cells of my body know they’re home, somehow, and they dance blinkily and starry-eyed like the fireflies in my mom’s garden.
Really Good Writing AND Art Out There Right Now: Tilly’s Tale by Wonderful Wee
She Was Robbed: “The notion that they would no longer be a couple dashed Helen’s hopes and scrambled her thoughts not unlike the time her sleeve caught the edge of the open egg carton and the contents hit the floor like fragile things hitting cold tiles, more pitiable because they were the expensive organic brown eggs from free-range chickens, and one of them clearly had double yolks entwined in one sac just the way Helen and Richard used to be.” ~Pamela Patchet Hamilton, Runner-Up Prize Winner in the 2004 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest