So. Another week, divvying up another passel of things-that-gotta-get-done among the greedy minutes, and all in a rush, it’s Sunday again.
That lead-in sentence up there? I tried out “zig-zagging through another week” and “plowing through another week.” I finally found the word that nailed it, but it didn’t scan. Spiralling. Spiralling through another week… it’s Sunday again, and I’ve just enough time to throw a few words on the page and post them before my self-imposed midnight deadline chimes and I turn into a pumpkin.
It doesn’t feel like pressure (though I’ve got people waiting for me in the room beyond). It feels like a pattern. I don’t feel rushed (though the clock is ticking). I feel comforted. Settling into my chair to write feels like settling into the ghostly outline of the me who was writing here last week. It feels like home. Unfolding the patchwork quilt of my journal, I lay it before me… and add another square.
I met my lizard neighbor today. Briefly. I know it was her — I’d know that scale pattern anywhere. She was oooh, lovely. Healthy-fat. Brown mostly, a little black and a little ivory on the back. A mandala of earth-colors, slithering deeper into her dwindling home, rustling the dusty, dead oak leaves as she scurried to hide.
Last time I’d destroyed her domicile, it was a gigantic mound of potato vine by the stone steps on the side of the house. As I’d hoped, she’d found new digs. Fleeing the devastation my clippers had wreaked on her geodesic potato vine dome, she’d found refuge in an oak-wood villa — a huge pile of sawed up wood that’d been left too long in our back yard.
Removing the pile from the yard and stacking it under the front deck has been on my husband & son’s “to-do” list since last March. I moved it to my own list in August, where it’s been steadily climbing toward the #1 spot.
Today it arrived. The wheel is turning, the rains are coming. Either I moved the wood today and stacked it with the other logs I’m aging, or it would sit out in the elements, melding with the earth all winter long.
I was on my third armful when she shot like smooth, undulating lighting from the part of the pile that was vanishing to the part that was still intact.
Damned if I was going to play Snidley Whiplash to her Nell a second time.
I left her a cottage. All the comforts of home.