You caught me lingering in another girl's paradise - the way she paints the world I want that in my life

I wear this crown of shit upon my liar's chair - full of broken thoughts I could not repair

It's amazing how quickly everything just falls back into the same old routine. Only a few days of classes and we might as well have been here for months, except that the workload is still only beginning to coalesce. Between sports, academics, and a job I have a nasty feeling that I will be made to feel both incredibly stressed and yet at the same time woefully inadequate to my responsibilities. Back to school blues, I guess.

On the up side I've gotten to see a lot of people whom I have missed for four months now. Some more than others, of course, as is always the case, but just as in freshman year with the summer researchers it makes an incredible difference arriving and seeing familiar faces. Home away from home. For the first three days, before classes start and everyone turns into notebook- and computer screen-bound hermits.

News flash: the sun has reappeared.
After over a week and a half of fog, cloud, rain, and downpour, intermixed with thunderstorms of every type from silent to reverberating, we finally had almost an entire day of sunlight. Granted the clouds were still there, but they never quite closed in as impermeably as has been the precedent. I never realized just how much a week of hot, humid, wet weather (the sort this state never gets in the height of summer; usually we are in a drought situation at this point) can do for the weed populations. Everything leather in the barn has also sprouted a coat of green fur. Haul out the saddle soap, girls.

So I was driving along today and I passed a van; you know the type, white, boxy, generic small business transport vehicle. Emblazoned in a bright crimson scrawl it bore the legend: "Sh-h-h-h Confidential Destruction."

So is that when you don't like the fence your neighbor built on the edge of your land, so you hire these guys to quietly rip it down at midnight? I mean, it's funny, kids these days...you never know what they'll vandalize next.

When you're finished with the mop then you can stop and look at what you've done - plateau's clean no dirt to be seen and the work it was fun

And the sign said the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls - whispered in the sound of silence

Have you come here for forgiveness - Have you come to raise the dead - Have you come here to play Jesus to the lepers in your head?

New Fly the Copter high score: 3976.

If that is the case, then I say even a pawn can become a queen if it embarks on a long enough journey.

Well spoken, mon ami.

La mia letizia mi ti tien celato che mi raggia dintorno; e mi nasconde quasi animal di sua seta fasciato.

To see you naked is to remember the earth, the smooth earth, swept clean of horses.

~Federico Garcia Lorca

"There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know."
~Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, clarifying US policy on the war on terror

In the end honesty is always the best course, no matter how unlikely it may seem at the time. And it so often seems that the truth couldn't possibly make things better, but I have come to realize that the damage pales in comparison to that of lies and time.

And what you wish for could come true - You act surprised, love - Are you?

So I finally made a comment about the renewed activity of the gravel-diggers today to my grandmother. Her response: "Yes, I'm going to call them up tomorrow."

Let the games begin.

PORTRAIT OF A STUBBORN OLD WOMAN

My grandmother has been a rabid environmentalist since an early age, and has lost none of her determination over her eighty-six years of life. Four years ago our neighbor to the east sold the large stretch of woods between his house and the river, which was almost immediately clearcut and the slash left to rot. At the center of environmentalist hell lies a dam. In the first circle, clearcut land bares its ugly face. Fuming but powerless, the grandmother exhorted the curses of a green heaven to fall upon the evildoers. She simmered.

That particular stretch of land also contains two old gravel pits, long since abandoned. A month ago, we noticed a renewal of activity along the access road that winds down to the river, from which the loggers' road plunges into the woods-that-were. Heavy machinery disembarked from trailers sporting "Wide Load" banners, front-end loaders and bulldozers and dump trucks disappeared into the woods. The access road was graded. Or at least that appears to have been the idea. It was scraped flat and loads of gravel were dumped and pushed along its length; unfortunately, the scraping only succeeded in lowering the road, and all of the gravel ended up in great drifts on either side of the road. On our land. Spring thaw will be interesting this year. There shall be washout, yea, and erosion fearsome to behold. But that will come later.

For a time the access road became quite a bustling place; dumptrucks full of gravel coughed past in intervals you could have used as a metronome. We assumed that the pit not visible from the road had been resurrected, and the owner making a tidy profit off, mark, his own land. But the state of things seemed too simple for the nature Nazi. They had disregarded all respect for the environment four years before, why should they change their ways now? She girded her loins for battle, and, shod in her sturdy Birkenstocks, hiked down the road to investigate. Trespassing must stand aside when nature stands threatened.

She found: a great hole bitten out of the side of the hill next to the gravel pit, red dump trucks busy as ants around the great queen of the D-9 Cat, burning piles of old slash, and a full-sized RV, complete with propane grill and comfortable extendable porch awning.

Immediate action was necessary. As the single dissenting vote on the Planning Board eight years ago for the building of the new high school, she knew well the strictures on land use, especially for commercial gain. A town permit was necessary, also a state permit. Also the verdict of an EPA inspector. She made the calls. A car was dispatched. A stop-work order was given. The dump trucks disappeared.

I often try to imagine the owner's reaction when told that his efforts, unimaginably costly but no doubt extremely profitable, had been thwarted by an 86-year-old woman. I imagine his frustration at the fact that the land in question belongs, beyond the shadow of a doubt, to him. I imagine snipers hired, to bag the old lady as she hangs out her washing. And finally, I chuckle as I imagine the old lady, when she sees the solitary dump truck that I observed today rumbling past, once again donning her paint and feathers and striding out upon the warpath. Regardless of the odds, regardless of permits granted, regardless of the hopelessness of her battle, she will smile grimly as she either finds and deals the fatal blow through the chink in the legal armor, or goes down fighting, to the last.

So I discovered today that taking refuge beneath the sunflowers can be extremely therapeutic after a long day.

No doubt bursting with enthusiasm, the carpenters that we hired to aid us in replacing a rotten sill on the house began hammering at 7:30 this morning. In the course of replacing the sill, a massive beam just on top of the stone kneewall that bears most of the weight of the house, we found several other crossbeams in the basement ceiling that were also in bad shape. Currently that corner of the house is sitting on five iron jacks, and we walk lightly.

Following this revelation, we drove down to Buxton to take possession of a new horse, an Appaloosa gelding that my mother had come across in her travels through Uncle Henry's. There must be something tantalizing about the idea of a free lease, because this animal, who had not at first met with approval, suddenly reversed his position and became a part of the herd growing in the back yard. His owner, unfortunately, had spoiled him quite badly, with odd theories of breathing and attuning and the avoidance of any sort of force. This is all very well for establishing a trust relationship between you and your horse, but Zen Buddhist horsemanship presents problems when said horse refuses to enter the trailer. In the presence of this sensitive woman one does not feel comfortable in simply popping a good one across his rear, which would have been most effective, and so we played chicken for the better part of two hours. Walking in, backing out, leaping in, rearing out, standing with just the heels of his hind feet on the door so it was impossible to close. Finally we were able to lift the door enough to hold it against his attempted retreat, and we drove a stamping, head-tossing creature forty-five minutes home. Whereupon he almost immediately got loose and decided to go adventuring up River Road, a rather animal-unfriendly area populated by speeding rural drivers.

Needless to say, my first impression of "Chance" was not a favorable one. His brattiness is almost human. So, once retrieval had been implemented, I retreated to my sunflowers, which appear to have grown about five feet in my week's absence. After all the rain we've had lately, the ground was soft and smelled wonderfully of earth and green things growing. I sat in dappled sunlight, diffused through a screen of stalks and great flat leaves, and watched the flowerheads sway in the wind, miniature suns lifting their faces towards their parent in the sky.

To all those with prurient and semi-prurient minds,

So. In my seemingly endless rounds maundering and gadding about at Ye Olde Borders Books and Music, I came across a title that was just begging to be shared with the initiates of our cult of romance-novel conoisseurs... I had written down the relevant information about two weeks ago, but in a fit of absent-mindedness I had consigned said scrap of paper to my mother's ravenous trash can. But I've got it now.

KNIGHT IN MY BED

by Sue-Ellen Welfonder, renowned auteur of Devil in a Kilt and Bride of the Beast (How could we forget the hero of that particular piéce de resistance, Marmaduke Strongbow??? (How DO you scream that, girls? It's too many syllables. 'Duke!!? Hmm...))


She planned to seduce- only to succumb...


A warrior in chains, a lady in charge, and a seduction too hot to handle! (Don't you love feminism?? The bondage-novel...)


Ahem.


As chieftain of the clan MacInnes, Lady Isolde (Arthurian romance, anyone?) will do anything to protect her people- including sacrifice herself to the enemy (sweet of her). Donall the Bold (I am reduced to a fit of the giggles trying to imagine screaming
that one), laird (!) of the hated MacLeans, lies locked in her dungeon awaiting execution. But rather than slay (!!) him, Isolde comes up with a daring plan to forge (!!!) a lasting peace between their clans.

Though Donall curses his beautiful captor, only a madman would refuse to savor the pleasures between that tantalizing aura of dignity and grace (take notes, girls...). But Isolde offers a mere covenant...(the ellipses!) and Donall craves nothing less than total conquest (how like a man...wouldn't you, if you were saddled with the epithet "the Bold"?). Vowing to steal her heart and take his freedom, the renowned warrior instead will find himself in a different kind of prison (clever, very clever), one made of sweet (!), decadent (!!) passion (!!!), one he may never wish to escape.


At this juncture I would just like to point out that, riveted by the suspense of the back cover, I opened this particular masterwork to find a cutting of the book - you know how they do that - on page one, where I read the phrase, "Mayhap the lass..."

I think that about sums it up for me.

There is indeed no place like home; I am finally back in my own beautiful state, where the temperatures are bearable and the people don't talk funny. I mean, come on, what is "ayuh" in comparison with "Ma'am, y'all have a good tahme now, y'hear? Bubbah naow sweetie."? I was roped into driving down south...deep south...where they take the greatest pride in sporting the most lurid shade of orange in the world and the expiring pickup with the Rebel flag in the back window is a dirty wifebeater'ed mulletted reality...with my sister for her graduation and to pick up all her stuff that had been left there, a not so much unwilling as uninformed accomplice. It rained merrily every night and the vast majority of the days as well, producing great claps of thunder unexpectedly at two in the morning that evoked nothing so much as a compressed combination of a shotgun blast and a small sonic boom. Not like thunder at all.

Anyways, I drooped through the week in 90+ degree weather (the humidity levels shall remain unaddressed for your sake, dear reader) and the endless socializing and overflow of sentimentality that marks any college graduation worth its salt. Estrogen reigned rampant. An eleven-hour drive yesterday and a ten-hour one today, with four stopped bumper-to-bumper traffic jams and a schizophrenic temperature gauge mixed in for spice, saw us home intact. I shall now proceed to collapse, gently and with dignity.