Let's review. How fleeting.

And so, I want to make sure that when I'm dead, they know how to make themselves chicken dinners, and so rather than show them "here is Tops, buy a chicken", I overshoot all that and take them to learn how to raise and kill a chicken, just in case....as insane as that is, that's pretty much my mojo laid bare. I often feel as if I'm going to die, and my response is that I better get a lot done. I have always felt that way. Which is why they exist at all. Because I would die soon, so I better get some kids out of me. And now that they're all here, I squeeze them close and want them to know how to build shelter and kill chickens and whatnot for when I (me, being the world of course) am gone and they remain.

"One of you is getting voted off the island," jokes TJ.

And don't forget to remember how fucking beautiful everything is.

view from Owls Head Mtn

And go to college here where I can send you, so at least I will have done that and you'll remember that.

view of Paul Smiths campus pond

On the way home, we saw this and stopped and I stood in the yard and imagined the chickens and the fruit trees I'd plant. When I was a kid, my grandparents had a cottage. It was sold for them to live on the money in Florida. It has been in my family for about 60 years, maybe longer. I've lived a lot places since, but there has been nowhere so much like homehome as that little shitbox place in Delevan WI, where every spring we'd open it and chase the nesting animals out and live the long summer season amidst the leaf mold smell. I'm starting to have lived just long enough to want to build things that'll be remembered as lifelong for grandchildren not yet born or married into or adopted - all the ones coming, hopefully, down the lines. Even if I'm not around, their parents could take them to "the house in the 'dacks", and then later when the grandchildren in their turn fell in love and lost their minds and got fired or in other ways inevitably lived and failed, they could go there and find some peace where the dishes were always those same old ones migrated there from everyone's kitchen upgrades over the years and years and years.

Tbone built me a playhouse (ie a potting shed, which for a grown woman is a playhouse), just like he did when I was 6 years old.

I went to get the permit and by the time I got back the old one shed was smitherines. The lady in the inspector's office told me to keep at least 50% of the original so that it'd be a "repair" and not a rebuilt.

 

 This is Tbone's idea of 50%.

 Corrugated PVC is the roof. I wanted to old school fiberglass that my Grandpa always used on every porch I can ever remember, which always had a greenish tint, but the PVC is the modern replacement for that.  It's clear, with a UV filter.

 Finished except for stain and a rain barrel.

 The "old soul" shed was the hangout for the ghost and his dead cats.  My phone disappeared half way through the job, gone for 3 days and we looked everywhere - stuff disappearing is always the sign that the ghost is peevish.  I gave him a beer and a smoke, and the next morning the phone was sitting under my purse.

Then off we went to the Adirondacks again.   I took a nature writing workshop at the ADK Writing Center, held hear at Nick's Lake Campground.  I wrote a prose poem about moss.  I'll post it if I can get it to suck less with revision....I kept freaking the other participants with stuff like adding miscarriages into musings about humus :/ 

 

We found this by "car hiking", our phrase for driving up super scary unpaved roads to see what's up em.  This is Stillwater NY, which you get to after about 10 miles (feels like 3x that!) of omg I hope the car doesn't die road through 75000 acres of state land, at which point you find a dinky "town" of a boat shop and restaurant (both for sale) and a cluster of houses on a damned expanse of rocky islands.  I'm still into the high peaks over the majestic water views, but this was a beautiful spot.
 

 

 Meanwhile, our frog hooked up.

"Dying. Not dying. Either way, it tires you out." - Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

I'm like this book. It's about a woman who is really pissed off a lot of the time, surrounded by people who can bear or not bear being pissed off themselves and thus her either. Most people can't bear it or her. And finally, she can hardly bear it herself. And then her bearing it is what she can do and it seems heroic inherently (to me), to be a really pissed off really old woman Then everyone dies (or has a baby, same difference).

Meanwhile, my father arrives today. Unless he gets pissed off about something and doesn't come, which is entirely possible. He was supposed to come yesterday but he was tired (which is right around the corner from pissed). He is to stay a week, unless he gets pissed... I am very happy he is coming. Which is odd. Which is aging. Even people who have been almost unbearably hard on my nerves take on increasingly value for merely remaining, some any kinda way. If you're on my books at all anymore, you're in the black, fyi.

"She took a deep, quiet breath and thought how she did not envy those young girls in the ice cream shop. Behind the bored eyes of the waitresses handing out sundaes there loomed, she knew, great earnestness, great desires, and great disappointments; such confusion lay ahead for them, and (more wearisome) anger; oh, before they were through, they would blame and blame and blame, and then get tired, too."

I am always up this time of the night still. The witching hour. Currently plotting a strawberry patch while mulling ... I should write more but...I am applying for a nature writing workshop thinking maybe I can embed all I might say into the description of the smell of a lake... A lake smells better than just about anything, almost.