When I first met the cat, she was hiding in the foliage of that horrible maple sapling. My yard is full of attempts at maple trees. I don’t know where the original maple tree grew here, long before we moved in, but there must have been one. By the time we got here, there were two little maple saplings springing up too close to the porch, mixed in with the hiding trees. There are tiny maple shoots the size... Read more
“Pray in a garden,” said Holly the witch. “It’s what Jesus did. Jesus didn’t pray in a church.” This is good advice, because the panic doesn’t let up when I walk into a church. I have stopped having panic in my backyard vegetable garden. Ever since Jimmy told me my stalker is dead, the fear has steadily drained away. Last week a friend slipped me some money for garden plants, so even though we are still on a knife edge I... Read more
Jimmy came over to fix Serendipity. The first thing he tried was putting in the new alternator. The bolts for that particular alternator and that particular bracket were not cooperating. At one point he ended up trying to use the 26-year-old alternator the Lost Girl’s family had stuffed into my car all wrong to see if it worked. I’m not even sure which alternator is in my car now. “Yeah you pretty much got cheated,” he opined, taking... Read more
Twitter was awash in another pile-on the other day, this time on the subject of food pantries. The person responsible for today’s pile-on just goes by her first name, Didi. Didi, based on her bio and profile photo, is a conservative Catholic woman who’s had a bad face lift. She wants us to know that she used to work at a food pantry but doesn’t anymore because the poor don’t deserve it, and she thinks this is Democrats’ fault: “I... Read more
I went to the backyard to watch the garden grow. The potatoes are just barely poking up out of the soil in the planters. Watching potatoes is comical. They stay underground just long enough that you think you’ve made a mistake and they’re not coming. And suddenly– there they are. After that it’s like Jack and the Beanstalk. You can’t re-bury them fast enough. They sprout above the ground again the next day. There are a few spikes coming... Read more
Jimmy came back to work on Serendipity, bringing the new alternator. He dug out the old one, an ugly thing that looked like a cross between an electric fan and a grenade. To his surprise, at a closer look, it was a replacement alternator that someone had put in my car after all. At first I thought that meant I’d been too hasty and hadn’t been cheated. But in reality, the situation was even worse. He said the alternator was... Read more
Jimmy finished taking the old alternator out of Serendipity, the ill-fated Nissan I bought in October. He kept knocking at my door to narrate his progress as he did so. I kept on getting up to look at the engine parts and nod my head. I didn’t know anything about cars, that was my downfall. Now, I feel like I’ve had quite the education. Yes, there was a junkyard motor in my used car. He could see the blue... Read more
I was going for a walk, instead of going to church. I still can’t walk into a Catholic Church without a panic attack. I miss the Eucharist. I wonder if He misses me. I don’t miss the agony, the smells and bells and terrible memories, the coming home in a panic, the going to bed Sunday afternoon and feeling unsafe into Tuesday. I want this to end, but I don’t see a way out. I was going to try... Read more
Jimmy came over to repair Serendipity. I told him again about the car’s alternator suddenly dying, and the mechanic downtown saying it had bad wires and couldn’t be fixed, and getting it towed to the Lost Girl’s house where her uncle put in a new alternator. I told him about how it died again instantly when I went to drive it after the fix. I told him how I’d been told, by the uncle through the Lost Girl, the... Read more
I planted potatoes, as I told you the other day. As I planted potatoes, I prayed, because gardening makes me feel like praying. And as I prayed, I thought about things. I balanced the planters on bricks so they’d have plenty of room for extra water to drain through the holes. Then I put a layer of gravel at the bottoms of the planters, for more drainage. Then I broke off all but the biggest eye on each of the... Read more
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