Small Treasures 2

This tiny treasure is an autograph book given by a mother to her son on his 14th birthday in Ashland Nebraska in 1887. I found it in a book shop in Cedarville California. The owner wouldn't take any money for it. "Its nothing," he said. The book is full of virtuous admonishments from teachers and maiden aunts (I assume) and saucy messages from girls that are quite surprizing. Some of the writers were barely literate. What I really like is the cover design. Very early art nouveau. Or is it just Victoriana?
Today a military man accidentally backed his pickup into my van. He was trying to make room for a bunch of vehicles jammed up in the parking area of a convenience store and he didn't see me. Major damage to the front of the van! And all I want to do is get out of here. The kid wants to pay out of pocket rather than through insurance, but I don't think he realizes that body parts for a VW van cost a hell of a lot more than for a GM or Ford. It will probably take months to get the parts. I think it could be made driveable fairly easily, but I have to get the money from the kid or his insurance. I feel bad because he was just trying to be a courteous driver. The day had bad vibes as we said in the golden days of the 60s. Of course I am a scientist so I don't believe in such rubbish but ..........
Spent most of the day finishing a quilt for a grandkid. I didn't like the looks of it so I decided to quilt in black stitches along the top a freize of animals including a little boy running. It is pretty nice. Windy and cold today!

Small Treasures 1

I wish I had a Jag XK140 and a diamond the size of a lump of coal. Even if I owned such things I'd be like the long suffering women who appeared on Queen For A Day and won much needed washers and driers then had to sell them to pay the taxes on them. I couldn't afford insurance and upkeep on a Jag or a monster diamond. Fortunately I gain great pleasure from found objects and Extremely Cheap Things. The picture is of a ring I found in the Llanos River near Junction, Texas. I had stopped to let the dogs get a drink and I looked down at the water and saw what I thought was a pull tab half hidden in the mud. When I saw it was a ring I stuck it on my finger and forgot it. When I looked at it more carefully I realized it was a tiny diamond chip set in silver. I think it is a quinceanera ring, but it doesn't look like any I've ever seen. It is bevelled which someone said means that an extension was added each birthday as the girl grew. I don't know. All I know is I love it. I'm sure its silver, but it stays shiny and never tarnishes. Must be a miracle. I found the ring about ten years ago. Seeing it on my hand reassures me in some way.

The Way Cats Fade

This is Jerry. He left home a year ago. His distraught owner plastered the town with his photograph. At first he was a green eyed tabby with a touch of red in his fur, but after a year of weather Jerry has faded almost to nothing. I do wonder why people don't take their notices down when they are out dated. Yard sale signs are the worst offenders. Jerry's owner must see Jerry's fading picture. Does he or she not take it down out of some forlorn hope that poor Jerry is still around? Perhaps they simply no longer care. I am deeply tempted to remove Jerry's picture from the power pole near my house. On the other hand it will be interesting to see how long it stays there. I could take a marker and give Jerry a Cheshire cat smile and see how long it takes that to fade with Jerry into oblivion.

Message in a Bottle.

I would have titled this post 'the tight condom', but I thought blog surfers with sex on their minds might find it. This morning I was walking with my dog and picking up roadside garbage as I do every morning. I saw what looked like a big plastic gin bottle. I picked it up. It was a mouthwash bottle and it had a lot of pencil written paper stuffed in it. Well if people will stuff their personal correspondence into giant mouthwash bottles and fling them out of car windows they can't expect me not to read them. This was an unfinished letter from a high school girl to some boy. There was also a speeding ticket and an academic progress record in the bottle. The girl got nothing but As and Fs. She averaged out a C. She wrote very well. She told the boy that she really valued the time they had spent alone working on an assignment. She said it was the first time she had been alone with him except for when they had sex, and sex was all right, but sometimes it was nice to be with someone and not have sex. She said she was writing to him because she expressed herself better on paper than when talking to him face to face. She wanted to know why he hadn't told her his condom was too tight the last time they had sex. "That's something I can't know," she said, "unless you tell me."
When I hear people say things don't change I have to disagree with that. I think young women have changed a lot. I'm not talking about the chattering class, I'm talking about the average girl. I think they have taken up equality with a vengeance. Hurray for them, except I wish boys had become sweeter and gentler instead of girls getting more aggressive.
Had dinner on the patio of a Mexican restaurant. It was cold so they had these portable propane fireplaces that they rolled around so everyone could feel their warmth. It was pleasant and weird to see these flaming logs trundling around the place. Very festive and the food wasn't that bad. We got into a slight political argument with the owner. I keep forgetting to be as calm and empathetic as I want to be. The owner gave us home made chocolate chip cookies so I guess we didn't bother him too much. I told him I could see the Virgin of Guadalupe in my cookie. He didn't care. He's Jewish I guess.
I have filled six 55 gallon industrial plastic bags with compacted pecan leaves. That's just the beginning. Two of my three trees are still green. I've picked up about 40 lb of nuts. The picture is a dead pecan leaf from last year. Those must be fastidious bugs that eat around all the little leaf capillaries!

Darkness

I need to hit the road again. Sometimes I wonder why I bought my beautiful little house. I'm a guaranteed stranger wherever I go so I feel at home anywhere as long as I have my mind to hide in. And America is so beautiful. I want to see every square inch of it! Well the West any way. The East is OK. It just doesn't hit me the way the West does, except New York City. I could live there. Some of the time any way.
Tonight I was walking in absolute darkness when a man on a horse came trotting by. He popped out of the dark and back into it with only the faint sound of unshod hoofs on the road. I call this man the Horse Chanter because he trains horses in different gaits by chanting the rhythm to them as he rides. He wasn't chanting tonight.
I love the darkness. I used to have the normal distrust of unlit places until I hung out for a while with people who ride freight trains and wannabees like me. I always wanted to hop a freight but unfortunately no one was stupid enough to agree to take me along and show me the ropes. I wasn't quite brave enough to try it on my own. The neat part was attending hidden camp fires along the tracks where we would meet to talk and sing and eat community stew. I heard some great stories. I nearly learned how to pee standing up. Sometimes it is good not to let the world know you are a woman. I think it takes a lot of muscular control! There are devices that are supposed to help -- but that's no fun, and any way I'm told they really don't work. So walking through the no man's land along the tracks looking for the secret fire gave me a wonderful feeling. I could see the roads and cars and houses where people went about their well lit business while I was quite out of sight. Not really voyeuristic as I had no interest in what I saw. It was just that I could not be seen. Unless the Guys were out with their night vision binocculars. What would they have thought if they'd seen me trotting through the dark with my bottle of Gallo Hearty Burgundy and some baked potatoes? Could they have mistaken them for Something Dangerous?

Moonglare

The full moon overhead glares down on the tin roofs and dusty roads of this village so it looks like a snow scene. The moon does not look romantic, it looks downright menacing. Is its gravity stronger when its light is perpendicular? I feel that if I were eight and a half months pregnant I'd go into labor under its influence...... The nights are getting cold and my roses may freeze tonight. I made holiday greeting cards today. I wondered why I felt so happy - then I realized it was because there was no technology between me and what I was creating. Photoshop does NOT rule. Its pretty good though..........

What The Heck Am I Doing Here?

These people are Tibetan street traders in Beijing. I guess they are Buddhists. I consider myself a Buddhist but in the last few days I have been exposed to such extremes of Buddhism that my head is spinning and I had to take a day to clear my thoughts and reassure myself that my version of Buddhism (absolute simplicity) may not be orthodox but works for me. Elaborate ritual, though charming, is not for me, and neither is hyperintellectualism. My IQ isn't high enough for either version.
One of my pecan trees has dropped at least half of its leaves. One tree is still ebulliently green and one has some yellow mixed in. A few nuts have fallen. From now until I manage to get out of here and on the road I will be clearing up tons of leaves and bagging them for the farmers to take for mulch and cattle feed and picking up nuts to sell. I may get the Tree Shaker to come with his archaic piece of equipment to grab the trees and shake the hell out of them. My trees are enormous so the shaker doesn't work too well.

The Pros and Cons of Being Very Quiet

This is a Redwood stump surrounded by its children. It must have been cut a long time ago judging by the notch that looks like an eye. Loggers cut these notches and stuck planks in them then stood on the planks to work their two man crosscuts.
Today I was wondering if my life would have been much different if I had not had such a quiet voice. I actually can raise my voice, but as a child my mother kindly advised me that I sounded like a 'Billingsgate fish wife' when I raised my voice. I had never heard a Billingsgate fish wife, and never will now as I think Billingsgate no longer exists, but I did get the message that it was not a genteel or desirable sound. So I talk quietly and don't get heard. My mousy little squeak dissolves ineffectually into the air as does my mousy little image, so eminently forgetable. Probably this is a good thing.
I suppose that being quiet does not mean having no voice. The people who sat in the Redwood trees spoke with their actions. Apart from holding up an occasional peace sign I do not speak through action. I stay in deep cover and throw my thoughts and stories into the void of the internet........

Acequias

I got acequia water yesterday. I thought it was over for the year. This 'wild and worthless' place was settled by people who saw a creek running from the mountains and sinking into the desert. They channeled the water into a system of ditches and settled into a fortified village. Twenty years later, persons seeking relief from the zeal of the law found the place quite suitable to their life style and joined the more peacable earlier settlers. The ditch water still floods our properties and enables great cottonwoods and poplars to grow along the ditches. There have been many law suits and speculation scams over the precious water. I am at the end of the line so I am at the mercy of people above me. I get 'left over' water, which means I don't have to open and close the gates. It is a community operation, overseen by a water master, and god knows why the system works as well as it does. If you shoot someone for cutting off your water I think it's considered justifiable homicide.
I awoke this morning to the smoke alarm. I borrowed a ladder to get up to it and replace the battery. Since I had the ladder I got on the roof and closed the vents to the swamp cooler and swept two years' worth of dead leaves and pecans off the roof. Then I had to rake up all the stuff I'd swept off and get rid of it. Took most of the day.
Today the Tibetan holy man gave me a stone on which he had written 'Om Mane Padma Hom' in Tibetan script. I told him I would like to copy the script. He told me I couldn't because it had to be 'perfect'. Hmm.

Fired or Terminated?

Yesterday I hiked up a canyon three miles - an increase in elevation from 4600 ft to about 6800 ft. It was quite hot but it grew cooler at the higher elevation and a breeze started sucking up the canyon. I reached an old line shack and there was some nasty looking water in a spring seep there which my dog drank and lolled in gratefully. My friend was attempting to save a sick goldfish. It appeared to be confused and disoriented. My friend had just been 'terminated' and she had a lot of pent up energy which she lavished on this creature. She tried every cure she could find on the internet which included feeding the poor thing frozen peas, soaking it in Epsom Salts, and wedging it in an upright position. She also buzzed the fish water in a blender (without the fish in it). Then a Tibetan holy man happened to drop by and he blew on the fish. If it recovers, to what do we attribute the healing? And was my friend terminated or fired? I said it doesn't matter, but it does to her. She is glad she is free from a job that didn't suit her, but that doesn't soften the ego damage, even when the people who 'let her go' are a bunch of deeply mediocre sycophantic flunkies clinging pathetically to the ragged hem of the establishment press. Yuck.

Rosa

When they honored Rosa Parks on NPR they sometimes acknowledged that she 'wasn't the first' to defy The Man. All honor to Rosa, but also to the unsung unknowns who stood alone and were rewarded with a broken nose or a broken neck.....
This morning on NPR again - source of all my information - I heard once more the story of the woman who was raped as punishment to her brother for his supposed affair with a married woman. I believe this was in Pakistan or India. The only significance this woman had was that she could be used to dishonor her brother. As a human being she didn't exist.
I don't think women would do much better than men if they ran the world, but if they participated equally at every level, there would be a wider selection from which to choose our leaders and perhaps then the world would be a better place. Rosa Parks where are you?