Jaci Dawn

Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might. Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness; And your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace; Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God:     Ephesians 6:10-17 KJV

The world was on fire. Starmund stood, alone. on the battlefield. She held her short sword at her side. ready. No enemy came forth, however, and she was forced to retreat to avoid the flames and hot lava.

Coughing, she shielded her face with her sword arm as she picked her way through the scorched landscape. Here and there, she picked out the corpses of dragons or warriors. She averted her eyes, unwilling to see, afraid of what she might see – or who. The brush, trees, earth all smoked from the fires of the battle. Blackened boulders directed her steps out of the battlefield, back to the cave where not two days before, she had sheltered with her fellow warriors.

The cave was empty now. The fire ring, the sleeping pads, the dishes – scattered about in disarray. No one had stayed there, and Starmund felt her heart sink. Had even the serving people fled? Or worse. been destroyed? This place was supposed to be impenetrable by the dragons, and yet – There was a large print in the soft soil near the entrance, clear and undeniable: a dragon had been here.

She was stumbling now, hungry, thirty, exhausted. She found a flask of water that remained unspilt, and she drank of it. There was a loaf of bread on a shelf, and she broke into it, eating hungrily, unwilling to look at it for fear she might see signs of mold and, therefor, throw it away. She staggered through the cavern, looking under blankets, checking cots, seeking any survivors. But there were none.

And no bones or corpses.

She sat down on the lip of the cave and stared out into the distance. Fires still burned. Judging by the occasional puff of fire in the heavens, the dragons still flew. And someone still resisted them.

Finally, she cleaned out the largest fire pit of debris. The fire was long cold, but the ground was hollowed into the earth, and she could curl up in the depression to sleep. She needed to sleep.

She curled into it, fetal position, on her right side, with her sword held at ready in front of ther, and her shieled pulled down over the pit to cover her. She willed it to look like just another abandoned shield, prayed that her God would make the dragons blind to the shield and her human form underneath it. Slowly, breathing from her stomach, she drifted to sleep.

It was the loud thump of something heavy landing in the cave that awakened her. The ground vibrated. A second thump.

“I’m tired,” spoke a basso voice. “This cave seems safe enough.”

“Humans have been here. Recently.”

“Gone now.” The first voice seemed to be right on top of her. “I cannot smell any.”

“Huh.” the other voice huffed. “Then we rest here. I will sleep at the cave’s entrance. I do not trust these humans.”

“I will sleep here.”

The ground trembled, and Starmund  felt her shield shift in the darkness. She tensed before she pushed upward and was relieved to see she could let in a whiff of fresh air. Two dragons. One close. One in the cave entrance. She needed strength and wisdom.

*stop. I actually started this years ago, before my sister died. What are your thoughts on this brief example? I’m open. It was started as a project for my sister.

I started this 31 day writing challenge for no particular reason other than to type out a few short essays, and maybe – just maybe – come up with a novel idea for November. Why November? National Novel Writing Month, better known as NaNoWriMo, wherein the aspiring writer is challenged to punch out a novel of no less than 50,000 words in just 30 days.

I’ve succeeded three times (I think). Two of my short novels have promise and one just is stupid, stupid, stupid. They are all sitting on the back burner of my life, waiting for me to get serious and edit, polish, and publish.

Why the back burner? Because, at present, I have building my art business on the front burner. And standing firmly between the two ideals (writing full time and painting full time, or a combination thereof) is my Day Job. 40 hours a week that I sell my soul to a steady paycheck, and I cannot work on the things I love. So I steal time away from my husband and hide in my studio and plug out as much art work related work and snippets of writing that I can get in.

Sometimes, I give in and go downstairs to watch a movie with the husband, or a series of television shows. Weekends, of course, I use for the mundane chores, gardening, and beer tasting.

That said, I have gained two ideas for a novel in November: a mystery novel involving my very boring view and a YA novel about a teenager in denial about her magical powers (the latter is winning the popular vote). I am considering writing that nanowrimo novel on my blog so you all can critique as I go, complain about lousy plot twists, bad grammar, and poor dialogue. It could be quite fun – and challenging for me, as I’ve never fancied myself as one who can take criticism. 🙂

I am also working on a 31 day coaching goal of building up my art website, improving my online gallery, and finding an outlet to advertise and sell online (my original goal was Etsy, but now I am comparing websites like Redbubble and Zazzle in hopes of reaching my target in sales). That’s not mentioning the idea of getting prints made (giclée is sounding more and more like what I want to do, but finding an inexpensive printer and the right size card stock + envelopes is proving more difficult than I imagined). I’d like this all in place before the real Christmas rush happens (wish me luck!).

It’s taking longer than I anticipated to get all the paintings scanned an uploaded to the right gallery on my website (which is where I am going as soon as I finish this). I did get them all uploaded to Facebook – I just need to “boost” my different photo albums in time for Christmas to see if I can’t pick up a few sales – so I did reach that step in my list of goals.

Art in October. Novel in November. And I still have to find time to deck the halls for all the different Holidays!

She was a fool for it, of course. Magic was in everything she touched. Not believing in it was a rebellion on her part. She just didn’t want to be different, or set apart, from anyone at school. She could hide her parents, downplay magic, even disbelieve in it – her friends accepted her. Better: they didn’t believe in magic. Photoshop, yes. Magic: no.

Anything could be digitally reproduced. Anything could be digitally created. There was no god, no spiritual side of things, and certainly no magic. Everything had a logical explanation.

Except that there was Aric, her brother, two years younger, horizontal to the earth and three feet up from the floor, levitating. He was playing a video game and levitating. She walked by and pushed hard on his shoulder, sending him crashing to the hardwoods.

“Hey!!”

Ella ignored him. She opened the fridge, pulled out a carton of milk and poured it over a bowl of Lucky Charms. Weren’t her parents just quaint? She sat down and scooped a spoonful of wheaty health and sugary death. Crunch.

Aric appeared in the doorway. “That was rude, Ella.”

She shrugged. “It’s not normal to levitate.”

“Magic.” Aric sighed and retreated from the room, too old to be bothered with his sister’s odd logic.

She saw her friends coming up the long walkway and grabbed her bags, clicked on the security code, and uttered a dire warning: “Leaving now, Derp. better come with as I’m arming the alarm. School time, Boyfriend!”

Aric appeared at her right hand as she opened the door and smiled. “It’s still magic, dork.” He ran past her friends and down to the bus stop. Ella rolled her eyes before locking the house.

“Hey.” she said, smiling up at Dish, Gran, and Billie. “Bus stop or did someone drive a car?” She winked at Billie, who had just passed her driver’s ed test.

“Actually, Ella, none of the above. We really need to talk about your denial. You can’t keep this up.” Dish was the tall, lean, dark-eyed one. His face was usually pallid and his eyes looked sunken most of the time.

Gran had a more athletic presence: wiry, compact, and a member of the school’s track team. Tonight, he had an unshaven look about his face, and his eyes shifted from left to right. Billie held his hand in a death grip. “Look, Ella, we really need to just come in and crash. It’s full moon, you know. Gran and Dish are having a hard time right now. Can we just hang in your room upstairs?”

Ella blinked a couple of times, and then looked down toward the bus stop where Aric was waiting. “Sure, why not?” She locked the door behind her friends as the yellow bus stopped to pick up the junior high kids and Aric stepped inside.

“So – what is up. Exactly.”

“Ella, Sweetheart, we need to quit denying the pull of the full moon.” Gran wrapped his strong arm around her shoulder. “And you can’t fool your little brother. He’ll be back in a few minutes.”

“What??!!” Ella whirled before her bedroom door. She understood the inuendoes. Had everyone gone insane? They all looked at her with such utter innocence. Billie spoke first.

“I get that you deny magic, Ella, but you are denying the basic truth of yourself. And of your brother. And of your best friends. We haven’t said anything because it didn’t affect us until now. Now they are threatening to put practitioners in jail. Read the news. Your parents have been arrested.” Billie shoved a newspaper under Ella’s nose at the same time as the downstairs doorbell rang.

Empathy: Write about your feelings of empathy or compassion for another person.

I check the news in the morning to make certain we are still here, on this planet, breathing air. Anything could happen in the night: North Korea could bomb us, war could be declared, martial law, an earthquake could drop the entire West Coast into the ocean.This morning’s news confirmed we are not all here.

A psychopath stood on the 32nd floor of a ritzy Las Vegas hotel and fired full automatic weapons into a crowd of 22,000 attending a country music festival in the arena down below him. He didn’t have to be a good shot: he’d converted at least one weapon to fully automatic. The last count of the dead was up to 59. Over 520 people injured.

I have tried all day to steer away from the false reports, the angry reports, and the graphic photos. My heart has hurt. I feel the pain of every mother, father, brother, sister, cousin, grandparent, friend searching for that one person. I die a little inside with each news flash.

We have an epidemic of madness in this world. If not a firearm, then a semi-truck. Or a suicide bomber.  Sarin gas on a commuter train. Hordes of Mongols on their sure-footed horses bearing down on unprotected villages, burning, killing, raping, and leaving no survivors. Machete-wielding tribes burning down churches and schools, following the blue print of the Mongols. Children targeted.

We want to explain it through politics and psycho-babble, control, and blame. We try to downplay the act with the words, “Not a terrorist act” – yet, it was surely a terrorist act. A lone terrorist with an arsenal of weapons, some converted illegally into fully automatic weapons, and a truly diabolical plan to inflict the most damage as possible before taking his own life.

I have no answers. I cannot peer into the mind of a being that would inflict such pain, horror, and death on another person – or group of people. I don’t understand how it happens in Israel or the Ukraine or Myanmar, North Vietnam, North Korea, France, Spain, Norway, or Ireland. I don’t know how it happens in Sandy Hook or Columbine High School or Clackamas Town Center.

Every time it happens, wherever it happens, I mourn with the survivors and the families, I sense the fear and terror of the victims. I can’t read certain history passages because of the violence, terror, and destruction. I am haunted by James Michener’s Afghanistan, where he describes a column made of human skulls, built by one of the Khans. Skulls of the conquered.

We’re a mad race, we human beings.

Tonight, I mourn in empathy with those who mourn.

Someone unexpected just sat down next to you on an airplane. Who is it, and what have you always wanted to say to them?

The airline oversold the flight. I wasn’t the unlucky bastard who got selected to not fly, but who does this on a holiday week? We’re all just trying to get somewhere to visit family, you know? At least I got in on the first call to general seating, and my carry-on was small, so I got to my seat and settled long before the plane filled. Keep a low profile, but walk like you own the world, that’s my travel motto.

They came down the aisle and asked the guy next to me to give up his seat. I thought he was going to fight them, but they offered him a nice sum of money and he said, “What the hell.”

The young man who took his place excused himself as he squeezed by me for the middle seat. Dark complexioned, well-groomed, professional. Looked like he could afford a first class seat, but here he was in 20B. We didn’t speak until after take-off and the plane leveled out. I opened my e-reader and he opened his lap top.

I didn’t mean to see his name or the subject of the email. Khaled Hosseini. The Khaled Hosseini. You know: author of The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns, And the Mountains Echoed? THAT author.

He didn’t stay on his email, but moved to a website -his website- and started answering fan mail. Me, I flipped out of the book I was reading and scanned through my e-reader. I found A Thousand Splendid Suns and reached for my courage. I held up my reader and said to him, “This book changed my life.”

He smiled. “I am glad to hear that. How did it change your life? Tell me about it.”

The flight passed quickly. We stood to disembark and he turned to me, “Thank you for telling me your story. I only want to tell the stories from my homeland, and yet they seem to resound with so many people. If you have a chance, I have a charity to help the people of Afghanistan. But if you will only encourage others to read my books to understand my people, it will be worth it to me.”

Then he reached into his briefcase and pulled out a copy of his newest book, signed it, and handed it to me. “It has been my pleasure.”

Truly a fantasy. 🙂

It is the late 1970’s, the “disco” era, but I have moved to a small town in eastern Oregon that is full in the grips of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. I’m single, and husband hunting. I’ve already been discarded by several, and have discarded several. This relationship stuff sucks big time. Most of my friends are married, but I have a few single ones who fall into two classes: strict Christian/no dating and crazy/drink a lot of alcohol. I’m somewhere in the middle: church on Sunday, but the bars on “Ladies’ Night” (Thursdays). Still, the prospects are sometimes dicey and I have to think up lies to slip out of a tryst or I go home alone, wondering how I am ever going to find love?

(Answer: wait for it. Those who strive for it are forever doomed to be disappointed. But I was in my 20s, and you couldn’t tell me that. It had to happen. NOW.)

There are a lot of songs that resonate in my soul. I love music. I can’t sing and I am pretty sad at playing any instrument (my band teacher once told me I was better than I thought I was, but I think he was just being nice). Heck, my 5-year old daughter told me, “Mom! Please! You’re off-key. Don’t sing.”

Still, I surround myself with music. LPs and 45s were my first introduction into the world of music, along with the folk music lessons of public school. I saved my pennies and bought records once I passed the model horse phase. I joined Columbia Records and then left them so I could sign up again, just to get the 13 free albums or whatever they were offering. I immersed myself in the folk culture of the 1960’s, the hard rock of the early 1970’s, and there was always – always! – the contemporary country music of the time: Buck Owens, Tammy Lynnette, George Jones, Loretta Lynn, Lynn Anderson, Charlie Pride, and (my mother’s favorite) The Statler Brothers.

In 1978, there were possibly three dance bars in the small Oregon town I moved to: Scotty’s, “The Snake Pit” ( a bar that was underneath the Shanghai Restaurant), and the Shang (the Shanghai Restaurant after restaurant hours). I avoided the latter. If I was drunk enough, and in the company of Carol (who was crazy), I’d go to the Snake Pit (not the real name of the bar, but the name I remember it by forty years later).

On the Snake Pit – I once danced several rounds with this elderly cowboy who absolutely rocked the “country swing”. He made bad dance partner look good. He was probably 70 and I was 22. He was looking for nothing more than a girl to dance with.

There was no dancing at Scotty’s, so the rest had to be done at The Shang. They hired a local cover band. The music was generic: anything from “Tupelo Honey” to “My Sharona” – if it had a beat and you could dance to it, they played it.

I realize I should be writing about my first dance with my future husband or the song that I felt (at age 23) should define our marriage (Tupelo Honey, by the way), but that isn’t the song that I have chosen to write about tonight (there are so many!). It isn’t even about the man I picked up on a Thursday night on the dance floor of The Shang: this is about a man who was never more than a casual friend, and a song that reminds me of him when I hear it play. Not a romantic interest, just someone I really liked as a friend.

His name was Alan. And, inevitably, we’d both be single at closing time, with no prospects for the night. So we’d choose each other and we’d close the bar to “Good Night, Irene”, and we’d go our separate ways. It was never about romance with Alan, it was just about that one song and that one closing dance.

I was introduced to the song when I was around the tender age of 12, flat-chested, and camping with the “Sage Stompers” – a square dancing group my folks belonged to. I remember the where: the Ranger Station at Hinckey Summit. My dad (a USFS District Ranger) opened the gates, and everyone camped down among the aspens. We kids were sent to bed with the crickets, but our elders drank and sang into the very late hours. I couldn’t sleep and listened while the adults grew louder, and my father got bolder.

He sang all the bawdy choruses of “Roll Me Over In The Clover” (to my mother’s protests that “some child might over hear”). Then he turned to the family friend, Irene, and sang (out of tune, of course) “Good Night, Irene.”

When I danced the last dance with Alan, and we slow danced to that well known number, it was never Alan that I was thinking about, but my father. And after the song was over, Alan & I exchanged hugs and went our ways. It was always platonic with him.

Now, when I hear “Good Night Irene”, it is not my father I think of, but Alan. I wonder where he is, did he marry, is he happy, did he have kids? He was a good friend. I hope he found the happiness I found.

(No one sings Roll Me Over in the Clover. That’s just embarrassing.)

My alter-ego has carrot red hair, freckles, and a wicked sense of humor. She isn’t shy. She doesn’t care about rules. And she likes monkeys (at least one monkey – Mr. Nilsson).

STOP. I don’t care who my alter-ego is, she hates monkeys. There isn’t anything remotely cute or sweet or funny about Mr. Nilsson, except that he’s a fictional monkey. Pippi can be my BFF, but Mr. Nilsson really has to stick to being a fictional monkey, and may never – EVER – come out of the book. I feel about monkeys how some people feel about spiders and snakes. No. Just. No.

Truly, if it were not for the stupid monkey, Pippi was my heroine in grade school. She had a horse. She could do anything she wanted. She was STRONG (which I have never -ever-ever been). She had braids that stuck straight out from her head. She was fearless. She beat up bullies, but not unkindly.

Pippi likes ordinary kids like Tommy and Anika (the latter of which is more like myself). She doesn’t like fake people, people with an agenda, and mean people.She has a horse with no name that eats oats on the front porch. (That may be the best thing about Pippi: she has a horse! We could ride all day long, or just groom the horse.)

Pippi is also an immortal, still a child the age of nine, and still running amuck in some town in Sweden, possibly with a young Astrid Lindgren. It is never cold in Pippi’s world, for, as she, herself, stated: “If the heart is warm and beats the way it should, there is no reason to be cold.”

Who hasn’t cherished a favorite toy at one point? Do you still have it or an old photo of it? What emotions does it stir up? Do you ever picture it coming to life like Buzz & Woody? Do you ever think today’s toys are “cooler” than what you had?

I got my very first model horse on a birthday. I disremember which birthday, but I do remember what I did the same day I got the Hartford Tennessee Walking Horse model (other than to name it “Black Satin”, nick-named “Blackie”, which was highly original of me). I took Blackie out to the empty lot out front so he could run in the dirt and jump small weeds, and dig up – oops! – small rocks.

I broke his leg off. I cried. I carried the leg around for years, lost it, and eventually made a prosthetic out of polymer clay which is still attached to him with wire and super glue.

Somewhere along the way, Blackie’s ears got chipped off as well. He’s endured a lot.

I decided this week that when I do my next declutter, the broken plastic model horses are going. I have a lot of fond memories of Blackie, but I don’t want to leave him to my children to dispose of. He’s long past the age any horse should live, and he had a lot of three-legged adventures in his life time. He even had a girlfriend, another model by Hartford that my best friend owned. I think her name was Cammie or Kammy, and she wasn’t a natural color for a horse.

I owned a lot of Breyer model horses, but I finally sold most of them to a collector back in the late 1970’s. I kept three back (including Blackie) – my favorites.

Man O’War is a Breyer horse. The story behind his is that there was a store in Winnemucca that sold tack and other goods. Dad shopped there/ I would wander to the back of the store where the tack was, and just stand and breathe in the smell of leather: leather saddles, bridles, halters. Sharp, tangy, and full of horse-ness.

There was a glass case back there which housed two magnificent hand-carved wooden horse statues, carefully painted: Man O’ War and War Admiral. As I recall, one was $75, which was a whole lot of money back in those days. And, oh! How I coveted Man O’War and his beautiful son, War Admiral!!

The closest I could come was the Breyer reproduction, purchased with my own money for around $15 or $20. Man O’War fell off of his perch about eight years ago, and his hind leg is glued on with super glue. Like Blackie, he is destined to be retired in the kindest way possible. I just don’t have room for broken horses anymore.

This is the only intact Breyer I have: WitezII Proud Arabian Stallion, mold #212. In my younger years, I fancied Arabians a lot, and this guy has had a special place in my heart. He was never one of the Breyer herd to be played with – he’s always been a display model. And, honestly, I never knew his name or the history behind him until tonight, when I googled “proud arabian stallion” under the Breyer website.

I will keep him. He’s the only plastic one I will keep – I have a much cooler collection of ceramic horses created under the Trail of Painted Ponies label (mine are all probably retired now). Breyers are great for kids who want to play with the horses and have them “run” and be free at night when noone is looking. But for collector value – which is what I need to think about when leaving this mess of “stuff’ to my kids – the Painted Ponies are worth so much more.

Isn’t it funny that our toys are reduced to resale value when we become old and think of having our children clean up after us? Goodwill – trash – eBay? That’s how the kids will think when they come through the estate and look at what the Boomers accumulated during their lifetimes (and their parents’ lifetimes, because I have certainly inherited my folks’ tendency to collect!).

In the comments, tell me if you have a prized toy you have saved? (My kids can’t play – I have their stuffed animals in boxes waiting to go home with them…maybe even sent some home already to one kid!!)

This exercise is supposed to delve into “what if I had taken that chance”, but I’ve always been pretty good at jumping and taking that chance.

Take the year 1977, for instance. I traveled by bus across America, by myself (blogged about here and ending here).

I haven’t taken those kinds of chances in ages, but I took a wild chance when I first applied for a job in the real estate industry (as an admin, not a real estate agent). I’ve made that a “career” – been at this for 17 years this October.

I took a crazy chance when I pulled my kids out of public school and started homeschooling them through middle school and high school (they may resent some of that, but they turned out to be pretty intelligent, well-read, and successful people).

Sometimes, I feel like I am stuck – the career is stale, maybe. I’m aging. I have so much art to paint and so many stories to write. Again, I’ve moved into the proactive mode: I have a mentor in art, now, and a life coach. I’m making goals and following through. I chip away at writing with exercises like this and a few hundred words a night on my novel.

I remind myself that my mother always encouraged me by telling me the story of Grandma Moses. My mother chose to die when she was 63, but she didn’t want that for me. I’ve inherited her Scots stubbornness, and I fully intend to push through and reach my goals before I age much more.

This all leads into: I intend to have my website, an Etsy store, my Facebook business page, and an Instagram business page all up and functioning before my 61st birthday. Talk about jumping off the deep end without a life jacket!

Now I *have* to be accountable to all of my readership, not just my coach!

(I’ll post links to all of those sites before October 22nd. I turn 61 in November.)

I am skipping over exercise #9 (what would you do if you suddenly came into a lot of money? A. Invest and Save) and working on #10 (What is a typical writer’s day in your mind? Describe.)

Mine would be a “typical writer/artist’s weekend”, the end result of which is *I hurt all over*. I’ll rub arnica lotion in before I crawl in bed tonight and hope I feel better in the morning when I have to get up to go to the Day Job. The Day Job currently pays the bills, but if I didn’t have to go to the Day Job, and I made money writing and painting, this weekend would be pretty typical.

Saturday, I pulled furniture away from three walls in the living room and washed those walls. I dusted all the shelves and items on display (sorry, no photos), and I washed the oak hardwoods with Murphy’s Oil before replacing the furniture. I cleaned out all the runners for the sliding windows (here, in the Pacific Northwest, mildew and moss is a huge problem, but they weren’t too bad). I washed each wooden slat on the Venetian blinds, and then I washed the big picture window and the small picture window (inside). That done, I gave the rest of the house “a lick and a promise” – deep cleaning is better left on a room-by-room basis.

Then I moved outside. I finished hacking at the rhododendron in front of the front stoop – I hate that plant! It’s pretty only when it blooms, but it covers up the front entrance, and for safety’s sake (mine), it needs to be hacked short every few years. It was also blocking the house numbers (has been for a couple of years). Suffice it to say, you can see our front door now. It was a butcher job, and – sorry – no pics.

A third of my lilac died last summer, and I got out the tree saw and cut out all the dead wood from that. I left the branches on the lawn because by that time, I was DONE. The only other thing of note that I did was to wash off the stoop and steps, and I met the newest new neighbors. (Our neighborhood has been in flux this year: we got a new neighbor across the street to the south, a new neighbor across the street to the east, two elderly neighbors vacated their homes [OK, Virginia died, but Selma moved to a retirement home and her house is now for rent]. And the neighbors across from Selma’s old place just sold their place. Their replacement is who I met). Daniel & Katie and the most adorable Staffordshire Bull Terrier ever. I mean, this guy up and climbed the retaining wall to sniff my pants and tell me how much he likes being our new neighbor. I like this dog!

Then I sat and waited for my husband to call because we were supposed to meet in Estacada for a particular brewery celebration. Don was out hiking with friends and said he’d borrow someone’s cell to call me when it was time. I watched Trolls (horrid, really – who recommended that?). I sorted laundry. I waited. I napped. I waited.

So this isn’t exactly an ideal day in the life of an artist/writer. But he finally called and it turned out that our plans had been canceled by other people and he was coming home. Life happens. Instead, we went down to Feckin’ Brewery and Smokehouse and listened to a pretty darn good cover band (Trying to Sleep). Then we watched a horrid French movie that I still haven’t figured out yet.

Today, however, has been the perfect example of a good writer/artist day. I had popcorn for breakfast, courtesy of the local produce store, Spicer Brothers. Bought pasteurized, but not homogenized milk from Garry’s Dairy, in glass jars. Whole milk. Came home and sank the bird feeder into a bucket with bleach and water.

Don was trimming up the rhododendrons out front, including my butcher job. We have to keep them trimmed up about four to six feet so I can see under them when I come home late at night (safety, ladies!) and we have to keep them trimmed away from the house by 2′, including the gutters. They generate a lot of dead material. (Bonus: he cut up and disposed of the lilac mess I left him.)

I moved to the back yard and took a tree saw to the horrid Oregon Grape I planted 14 years ago. I thought ALL Oregon Grape was a low growing shrub with pretty yellow flowers, so I planted this stuff in innocent bliss. I had little idea that there was a commercialized variety that grows 10-12′ tall and basically takes over your life. The smallish shrub I have always enjoyed turned into a gargantuan monster that shaded out my southwestern garden corner. Last year, I began the move of killing it all and restoring balance to that corner of the garden.

I cut down three of four bushes last year, but was stymied on the fourth: too many tree-like stalks growing out of the ground. The three I cut down last year, I have continued to hack all summer, and I hope will eventually die because I refuse to let them grow. Don came out and helped me kill the fourth – and final – beast. I now understand why my friend, Tori, stated that she “hated Oregon grape”. I thought she was being over-dramatic. Hah!

Still no photos.

We broke for a beer break and opened the first of the beers in Donald’s prize case from Feckin’ (for the barbecue): Feckin’s tasty IRA. It’s a red ale, not too hoppy, and very low on the IPA scale (I hate IPAs, just for the record). An excellent ale.

Then we watched bees. This is a note to not be underrated: bees. I can name three neighbors who use chemicals to kill weeds and insects. I have a sign in our front yard proclaiming us to be chemical free. Fifteen years ago, our first summer in the garden was spent asking ourselves, “Where are the insects?” We had no insects, no birds.

Fifteen years later, we have a plethora of bees: green, black, honey, bumble. Wasps (I welcome all except yellowjackets). Spiders. The birds are amazing.

Speaking of birds, I cleaned the bird feeder, stewed down some suet and added dried mealworms. We rehung the birdfeeder full of black oil sunflower seeds and one suet feeder. Then I came out to see my car covered in this:

The little shits shat all over my car. Pretty certain it was hummingbirds who were upset with Don trimming the rhododendrons, but – really???

I spenbt the rest of the afternoon tracking down insects with my Google Pixel (it takes better macro photos than my DSLR). The bees weren’t cooperative, but the fall wolf spiders were.

Finally, after showers, laundry, dinner – I was able to sit at the computer and write, scan, and create. Perfect day for me. 🙂

I still have time to work on a chapter in my novel.