In Which I Tell You Everything, Yet Nothing
May 25, 2013
Sometimes an idea hits you in the head; sometimes ideas accrete, piling up little bits of this and that until it becomes a firm foundation for the next step. I think I figured something important out. I hope to implement it in the near future. I do not like to be coy. I am not a fan of the 140-word oblique reference. You'll know soon enough. And if you don't, then you'll know I am still working on it.
I do my best thinking in the car. I am, like The Empress, a ruminator. I think, ponder, fret, worry, and dwell. To combat this, I put on my earphones as loud as I can stand it and sing along as I drive. No, it's not the same if I put music through the speakers. My brain is so swirly-whirly that I need to have the music get right to the ear drum and into the brain cells directly. Kind of like shooting up into a vein (I suppose) but without the horror.
So I drove and drove yesterday to be here on the Cape. I escaped heavy the blindingly heavy downpours of the night before, but there was an intermittent drizzle that sometimes turned into regular, large plops. The northeast is wet, cold and soaked through. The mountain laurels are heavy with bud but too cold to blossom. The heat is still on; the hammock is dripping and about to moss over.
When I got out of the car at The Cottage, my heart hammered a little because the garage door was covered in some kind of brown goo. When you are are not a full time occupant of a home, it can do strange things when you are gone. You find a tiny puddle of water in the middle of the laundry room; tor he dirt in the corner where you swept before leaving; or a near-record accumulation of twigs and small branches on the front lawn in the space of 4 days.
I realized after a minute that the brown goo was not an outbreak of, let's say, carpenter ant excrement, but leaf casings, the tiny brown hull that protects the leaf before it buds out. The house and yard was covered with a paste of this gummy, wet stuff that looked like crepe paper put through a mesh and sprayed everywhere.
My mind is kind of like that at times. The discarded emotions that others can quickly discard tend to linger and get all mixed up with the current emotions and suddenly I am clinging to thoughts, words, and emotions that have nothing to do with current circumstance. It, too, creates quite a mess.
So today, with a house full of kids, dogs, mud, rain, battered leaf and leaf casings, and the noise of too many people disappointed in a wash out of a holiday weekend, I am not trying to escape, but sitting in their midst, drawing and cooking, finding a deck of cards, some bones for 3 (!) dogs, and very grateful for those very tiny, very useful earphones.
I am giving you some photos from another weekend. Let's all pretend it's this one!