Fragmented

It was somewhere that was then still outside Los Angeles. Heat-bent light rippled the pavement, the still summer air was made wind by the car's motion. Going somewhere, I don't recall where, that day when the scored lines of flat brown fields drew my eye to the row of drooped eucalyptus, I coveted the shade they cast and the silence I imagined enfolding that distance. Beyond them was a grove of some sort, dark shine wrapping green leaves, perhaps water seeping rootward through the brown earth they dappled.

The bent light was like a shimmering transparent sea where a range of hills floated. The angle of the road we traveled made the hills seem to drift, and I pictured them departing, a vast tract that would diminish and vanish, never to return. We were not going to those hills. It was somewhere else we were bound, where the moment would be lost.

It remained lost until today, when heat-bent light brought it back, bearing the ghost of the field and trees and orchard, and conjured the image of those hills that seemed to drift. How long ago was it? I must have been five or six. The scene must have long since been displaced by buildings and multiplying roads, but here's its unchanged memory filling another place a near lifetime later. So this is where those hills were drifting, not on bent light but on my own imagination. How strange it was to see them again, and stranger still to see myself watching them from so long ago. It makes me wonder what would have become of me had I gone with them.


( Sunday Verse )

Clumsy

Well drat. I posted yesterday's entry just at midnight, but made it private while doing a bit of post-midnight editing on it, and then I forgot to make it public again when I saved it. That's the explanation for the missing Sunday Verse. Dumbassed move.

Also, the cat threw up a mushy hairball on the kitchen counter as I slept, and I had to clean it up before breakfast. I'm hating Monday.

On yesterday's shopping excursion I bought more cherries. They come from the radioactive inland region of Washington state. I'm a bit disappointed that they don't glow in the dark. What's the point of having a huge nuclear waste dump in your neighborhood if it doesn't even make your local fruit glow? I suppose I'll have to settle for stomach cancer twenty years hence, and bite some wintergreen lifesavers in the dark for luminous entertainment.

I've thought about tossing a few cherries into the back yard for the birds to peck at. I'm sure they miss the cherry tree as much as I do, and they're probably getting tired of the cat food they steal. The cat food is way cheaper than the cherries, though, so maybe the birds won't be getting any fresh fruit until the peaches ripen.

Yesterday evening I finally had to turn on the air conditioning, because I was on the verge of heat prostration. It was only on for a couple of hours, so the hit on the utility bill won't be too bad. Mere double digit temperatures through the coming week should make any additional use of the infernal anti-infernal machine unnecessary during that time, but I won't be baking anything in the oven. No baked macaroni and cheese for me. I'll soon be sick of sandwiches and salads. And unintentional alliteration.

The air is full of drifting seeds and spider silk this afternoon. That's intentional alliteration. I could have added that I've been sneezing, which I have been, but that would have taken it too far.