Saturday, August 9, 2014

Summer Stream (of consciousness)

I took the trash and went to the post office. Plenty of bikers were on the road. Bikers like the kind that wear spandex and helmets and cycle with their own legs. Cars were backed up. In Lloyd.
The usual trash guy was there. The same one who figured out that my husband is a car dealer and now he wants my husband to find him a good, used pick-up truck for probably about five thousand dollars. You'd be surprised at how many people want a good, used pick-up truck for about five thousand dollars. Far more than there are good, used pick-up trucks for five thousand dollars.
The post office had two people in it. I think one was white and a man and one was black and a woman. There was no mail in my box. I felt cheated.
When I drove past the house next door which has been abandoned and foreclosed on and recently, I suppose, perhaps bought or perhaps merely the tax note bought (my husband tried to explain this to me last night as we were drinking martinis and I didn't really understand but I don't think I would have understood without the martinis but I pretended to understand as I threw bread to the chickens and said, "Oh. Okay. Yeah," and stuff like that), I checked out what has been done to the house and the yard. The yard is all cut and trimmed up and the branches hauled away. The porch is cleaned off, the chair and weird sitting-thing (not a chair) have been taken away. It looks like a real house again. It is such a pretty house, not as old as mine, but old enough, and it has good bones and I wish someone who loved it would buy it and I would tell them about the honeysuckle growing over the front gate that a former neighbor planted for his mother on Mother's Day one year when he was a little boy and it's still there and blooms every spring and he is a grown man now in every way.
I came home and cooked three eggs and some bacon and toast. The eggs were either Missy's or Eggy Tina's or a combination thereof. Their eggs will fit into a tablespoon so I ate three tablespoons of eggs, approximately. And yet, they seemed just like three regular eggs in all regards except for their smallness, and also, the color of their yolks which are so gold and orange that if they were any golder or oranger, Buddhist monks would use them to dye their robes which might be a tricky, sticky business but beautiful beyond belief. I know that some people feed their chickens marigolds to make their yolks so golden but my chickens do not eat marigolds and still, their yolks put the sun to shame. If their color were any more intense, I don't think I could eat them. It would be weird. It is also weird to eat eggs in restaurants where the yolks are the color of pale lemon which is a pleasant color, but not one I'm used to anymore as applies to eggs.

This is what I have done so far today. My right eye feels funny and the day is hot already. It is going to get hotter. I should drive to the river and jump in but there will be people there and I do not want to see them. They might be the nicest people in the world; still, I do not want to see them. Let's not even talk about how horrible it would feel to encase my body in a bathing suit, the lycra/spandex/nylon itch of it. I already feel as if my body were encased in something like that, even though I am wearing: one white tank top made of cotton, one pair of overalls made of cotton, one pair of black underpants, made of cotton. Also, one small gold hoop in my left ear and one necklace of gold with one gold heart on it and one Virgin of Guadalupe charm.

I am thinking of all my summers and that's not even possible but mainly right now I'm thinking of a house I lived in on the back of a cow field in North Leon county one summer. It was a Jim Walters home (meaning it was a piece of shit house but it's still there) and the landlady who lived next door in a nice trailer with air conditioning and everything, had painted the whole place in one day and she painted AROUND the sofa and I'm not kidding you. It was so hot and I cried and raged all of the time. We had bulldogs and no money, no money at all. An old man named George used to come by and want to touch my hair and our bulldogs growled at him. One time our friend Waldo, who lived across the road in an even shittier house came over to use the tub because his house didn't have a tub or even running water, probably, and I didn't know he was there and I opened the door to the bathroom and there he was, in the tub, and he looked like a child, he was slightly built and had long blonde hair and I'll never forget the way the light was shining on him like he was a Child Of God and I was surprised to see him but no harm done. We were not afraid of nudity in those days and why should we have been? We were young and beautiful, every fucking one of us, even if we were hot and raging and penniless.
Waldo was a violinist. I imagine he still is.

We ate beans and rice that summer and I made cornbread and we went out to the cow pastures and picked mushrooms and ate them right there out of the cowshit. Free entertainment. One time I lost a necklace in the woods bordering the cow pasture and another time I found it, right there on the ground where I just happened to look down. Semi-miracles abounded that summer, the main one being that we lived through it all.

Our friend Leonard gave us two hens and a rooster. I think the bulldogs ate them.

It's been a strange life. Today feels like a strange day. I suppose it is just the summerness of it all, the sound of the crickets and the way the heat feels and so forth.

I wonder where Waldo is, that necklace, the bones of our dogs, the son of our landlady who lived in another house across the street, a real house made of bricks and he kept vodka in the freezer and he told me that every day when he came home from work he would sniff the air to see what I was cooking and he told me I cooked like a black woman and that was a huge compliment.

I remember waking up in that house late at night, broiling hot on the mattress on the floor we slept on, my boyfriend not there, not there at all, but somewhere out in the world, probably with another woman (oh-fuck it- surely with another woman) and we had no phone and those nights lasted forever as I lay on the sweltering mattress, listening to the sound of the night animals through the open windows, straining to hear the sound of my car  which he had taken coming up the road and it seems as if it never did but of course it did, eventually, although usually long after the night creatures had quit speaking and the mockingbirds had taken up the chorus which powers the universe and I swallowed his lies along with the beans, the rice, the cornbread, the mushrooms, his kisses, and it all turned out fine, eventually, and better than fine but looking back, I realize it was hard and I sort of want to cry for that young hippie girl, waiting for her man in the August nights, wondering if he was dead and if he was, what would I do with the dogs and what would I do with me and my crummy life waiting tables in one dive or another and if I could talk to that girl I suppose I might say, "Hang in there. You'll get beautiful babies from him. It will be worth it."

And it has been. And smash! I'm back in Lloyd and I can turn on the air conditioning and I seriously doubt I'll find anyone in my bathtub where the light shines so softly and beautifully, although if I did, and it was Waldo, I would not be sad.


  1. I had no idea where this outrageous post was going, and then BAM! I loved it, loved every single word. I feel as if I've been taken back in time to my own youth, even though my life was so profoundly different. Yes, we were all so gloriously naked, and glorious naked, no matter who we were or what sort of life we led. Happy Saturday, Mary. I feel like mine is going to be richer for having read this post this morning.

  2. I believe I missed your rambling while I was gone. The summer before I ditched my first husband, we decided to build a yurt out in the piney woods and try to put our relationship back together but what actually happened was that he would take the car and go in to the nearest town where he was supposed to be trying to find work since we were both unemployed, me having quit my job (he didn't have to quit his as he never had one), but what he was actually doing was getting stoned and fucking other women. The few times I would be in town I would tell the few friends to come visit me since I was stuck out there all day by myself. So one day, I was doing the dishes and it was so hot because it was summer in east Texas and we had no air conditioning and even if we did it wouldn't have matter since our one room 'house' was a barely enclosed camp shelter and I took all my clothes off and was doing the dishes naked and that was the one and only time anyone came out to visit me and I didn't hear him coming and suddenly there he was and I was standing there buck naked doing dishes. It startled me but then I just welcomed him in and put on a robe. Before the summer was over, I packed up my shit and went back to the city and filed for divorce.

  3. Elizabeth- It was one of those sit-down-and-see-where-this-thought goes kind of thing. Thank you.

    Ellen Abbott- Oh, the shit we put up with, right? Damn. Well, at least we have some good stories to tell. At least we got to wash dishes naked. I'm glad you divorced that guy. Obviously.

  4. Good lord. A slice of history so thickly evocative I could eat it with gravy. Incredible.

    I have to admit, though, I did envision a Where's Waldo joke...

  5. Jo- Good one! The link, that is. Thanks for being able to find yourself there, back in the past with me. I mean it a lot.

  6. Did every woman have a man that took her car to go fuck other women? I sure did thankfully I didn't marry him. Gail

  7. Gail- Hormones. What could we expect?

  8. absolutely beautiful post, Ms Moon. I was literally transported into your life............for a few minutes, and it was wonderful. Thank are so gifted in your writing that I am dumbstruck (I love that word) at times
    Susan from Ca

  9. What a terrific story. Or series of stories. I am envious of your life and your youthful freedom. I feel like such a conformist man-in-the-gray-flannel-suit next to you, having never walked in on a neighbor in my bathtub and never picked mushrooms out of cow shit.

  10. Oh, and Ellen's story too! Love it! A yurt in East Texas!

  11. Steve Reed- Unfortunately, you were born a little tiny bit too late to be a hippie. Ellen was not. But hey- it's never too late!

  12. I remember the nakedness and bathing in an old cow trough after hiking in the Blue Ridge mountains. In fact, I spent a lot of time naked in fields and in an old trailer on a farm that had only an outhouse. It was a glorious time of exploding hormones and freedom and beautiful people. Thanks for bringing back some memories.


Tell me, sweeties. Tell me what you think.