wouldst thou join me on the dance floor?
Hello, late December. Christmas is over, the new year is still unborn, so I’m the dry turkey in the middle. About a month ago, I tweeted “2015 has been one giant shit show punctuated by occasional mercy flushes.” I stand … Continued
My best friend and I spent an entire day seated on a blanket spread in my living room, announcing we invented a fun new game called “invisible picnic”. It was boring. Invisible fried chicken legs were tasty for .3 seconds. … Continued
I don’t remember whose idea it was to climb into a strange car in the middle of the night and drive around Boulder, Colorado looking for flowers to steal. On our direction, the driver would stop and several of us, all students, bolted to the flower beds that lined the streets in a posh section of town. We tore stems, dozens at a time, free. By the time we decided we’d gathered enough, we were buried under piles of irises, peonies, daisies, zinnias, snapdragons.
Once home, we dumped our haul onto our long, scratched, fiftieth-hand dining room table. They smelled incredible, filling our dank little rental house on The Hill with the wheeze of tender summer, just beginning to unroll. We didn’t own vases or containers that hadn’t or wasn’t currently holding alcohol…read more
I grew up in the desert and thought it was the most beautiful place on earth. My best friend in high school and I would ditch our afternoon classes senior year to drive to sandstone cliffs, where we’d climb and tan and talk as lizards scuttled near. We’d kick up red dust in dry stream beds as we hiked, mindful of scorpions and rattlesnakes. It seemed perilous and that was part of the attraction.
It was quiet. There was always something soaring. I can’t speak for her, but I was aware how unique it was to grow up in such a place. I felt blessed to be a desert-dweller.
At night, we’d drive up twisty roads to the top of formations hand-hewn by New Deal workers to sit cliffside. Heat lightning flashed in the distance. Had we been able to transport across the valley below, underneath the flashing clouds, we’d find no rain falling. It is common for thunderstorms to roll through dropping no rain. Just angry, gorgeous zings tapping out a code with the light they exhale…read more
When a curled, dried leaf hits the street, it doesn’t stay. Wind scrapes it to the wall of a gutter where it gets matted by rain runoff. It’s not going anywhere, but it’s not alone. All its partners on the tree above are shed, too, then raked up together and stuffed into black plastic bags. The time spend sewn to a tree where the stem meets the branch is a flash compared to the harvested, dark state. Separation is always painful.
The first time I heard the theory plants feel pain, I was a child. It was a ludicrous, laughable idea…read more