MindSpinner

You know that bowl of spinach you just ate does not smell good when the orange kitten sniffs the bowl and then scratches earnestly all around it as if to bury it in litter.

Catapult Kid is home again, his future with the Guard uncertain. Responsibility for the screw-up lies with a flawed recruitment process. Initially decked by a deep disappointment, he’s been recouping, re-adjusting, and re-envisioning his future.

On another front, my new name is No, No, Nanette, a sea change which means nothing much to anyone - and shouldn’t - except to me.

Life in 3D requires much of my time, mental energy, and emotional fortitude right now, so I’m giving notice that I’ll be ducking in to write a post when writing is a good to me or when something insists on being written down, but I won’t be trying to post just to be regular or consistent about it.

In the meantime, my best to all who stop by .

The orange tent out back
will come down today.
The blue cooler still partly filled
with ice and cans
of Coke and Ale 8
will be emptied.
Diverse sleeping bags
will be wrangled into rolls,
more or less,
and stashed away.

The boy who invited his
best buddies over for a rolicking
midnight Airsoft battle
(and when he was two
strode straight into the roiling surf
of his very first sea)
will be leaving
on Tuesday for eight
months of training.
His Special Forces unit
has already been calling
to see how long
’til he’s ready.
Military Intel people,
so it seems, are needed yesterday.

On the other hand,
last night’s 6mm plastic BBs
will be unearthed in my garden
for the next thousand years.
Green. Blue. White. Yellow.
I swept up the ones
strewn across the driveway
near the car and the wood pallet
stood on end for defense,
but I will not pick up
the ones fired and fallen in the garden
among the carrots and the onions,
the thyme and the slender
green blades of iris.
Not even one.

“I love your dress,”
the preschool teacher
told me this morning,
after admitting she’d
forgotten my name.
I don’t wear this dress often:
the bottom buttons,
modestly secured according to
the dress code for teachers,
impede purposeful strides,
the sort that get me to the copier
and back to the classroom
during the last five
minutes of lunch.

In the spring of 2000,
during the long beginning
of an ending,
I bought this dress
for a business trip to Hilton Head,
a planning meeting.
(Once upon a time
and for a little while,
I did freelance work
in Web design.)
I carried a suitcase
containing the dress
and other things new,
a laptop and a 10-pound cake
through three airports
to deboard a tiny plane
on the island, pausing on the way
to the rental house,
not alone, to walk along the docks
where people played in music and light
reflected on water.

Seven years later,
far from a shore I walked on for a day,
I have a dress
I sometimes wear to school,
a shell a little boy gave me
on a stroll down the beach,
a photograph of people at work,
ideas posted all over a pool house,
a memory of friends gathered
(these partners were friends),
the indelible surprise of a wrap offered
when I was cold, and gracious goodbyes.
I have songs.

According to MapQuest,
I am 633 miles (and seven years)
from Hilton Head today.
Funny that I was ever there,
in another world.
Funny that a dress is here
and a shell - artifacts.
Funny what remains.

Spread newspaper on table. Find good short paring knife and the first of several required bowls. Place laptop beside newspaper and turn on NPR because snapping an entire bucket of beans will take a while and could get a little dull. (After checking a bean for spots, it is possible to read a sentence or two online while breaking it.)
Grab a couple of handfuls of beans and put them on the newspaper beside bowl.
Trim each end off bean and snap beans into 1″ pieces.
Put Orange Stripey Dude down off the table.
Trim beans and snap.
Put Orange Stripey Dude down off the table.
Trim beans and snap. Grab another handful of beans from bucket.
Put Orange Stripey Dude down off the table.
Trim beans and snap. Hold Orange Stripey Dude for a few minutes and scratch under his chin before putting him back on the floor.
Trim beans and snap. Grab another handful of beans from bucket.
Put Orange Stripey Dude down off the table and give him his very own bean to play with.

Who knew how much fun a grean bean could be? Not me. Sounds of chasing and batting come from under the table.

Trim beans and snap. Get another bowl. Note that Orange Stripey Dude has grown weary at last and is falling asleep, lying with his back against the refrigerator, his left front paw resting atop his green bean.