The Going

This story has been accepted into a post-peak anthology - After Oil: SF Visions Of A Post-Petroleum World, edited by John Michael Greer and published by Founders House Publishing (http://www.foundershousepublishing.com/)You can buy the book at: http://www.amazon.com/After-Oil-Visions-Post-Petroleum-World/dp/0984376453/ref=pd_rhf_gw_p_t_2; thanks to all who posted feedback and helped me polish it!

Overlay (poem)

Overlay
there are two towns…

I.
The first welcomes you, a stranger;
saffron side streets like one-act plays unrolling
nothing in the expected place.
The ghost of the town you left
overlays its face, confusing
the issue further.

Every direction in new coordinates:
East by NewEast by Sudden by West;
maps tied to every venture
distance will not settle into one length.
You are not yet here, as they are
who walk so easy on untranslated sidewalks
who navigate by hidden grids.
Cafes, bookstores, groceries —
find touchstones; find the core.

Approach like a lover
and it will let you in.

II.
The second, found under the first
when newness rubs off:
your new home town. As years etch
invisible pathways, you overlay comfort’s GPS,
your autopilot unerring
except at scattered moments, catching
a startled glimpse — scrap of first town —
the stranger-glaze showing
and you wonder how you could ever
have so mistaken it.

copyright 2011, Catherine McGuire

This poem is part of a chapbook tentatively titled, "Reflections, Echoes and Palimpsests" to be released in September by Uttered Chaos

I welcome all the bloggers and visitors from the Blue Print Review blog carnival! (note: this blog has been dormant for too long, but you can see more of me at www.cathymcguire.com)

Really the Last

It is obvious now that I can't keep this blog going on any kind of regular basis... so I'm throwing in the towel. I appreciate those of you who poked your head in from time to time to read my entries. I am still having adventures in housewrecking - fortunately, only my own.

Oh, and the mourning dove now has a partner ('tis the season) - whoever said two can eat as frugally as one?? Those two are gobbling everything in sight!

Anyway, someday I might try this again. It's been fun, but I need the time to live my real life. Take care,
Cathy

At Long Last...What?

In case you were wondering, I hadn’t succumbed to one of those adventures I’ve often recounted; haven’t fallen out of the apple tree or slipped on the roof moss… No, aside from my typical run-ins with gravity (birdseed should have a warning label), I just seem to be busier and busier with the effort of keeping up house and yard, and working from home, and trying to be creative in whatever hours (minutes) I have left. I travelled for half of November, but since some of my favorite bloggers seem to carry on their daily analysis of national crises while apparently hiking in the Mohave Desert or Arches national wilderness, that’s no excuse, I know. I have added a little wingnut thingie (okay, widget - just as idiotic a name) so that you can get alerted to my increasingly random postings… I don’t want to give up completely, but I accept that I am not a daily blogger… I’m not a daily anything! My lack of consistency is part of my charm (except in most circumstances).

Anyway, to catch up: the house is snug against the fall/winter rains and I love that smug feeling (oh - I mean snug, really I do…). I even decorated the new front porch for the holidays, since I was no longer calling attention to a chipped concrete step with an embedded steel waterpipe handrail. No, this year it looked like the back end of a caboose when tricked out in lights… hadn’t noticed that before… Of course, like all my adventures, this one almost self-destructed. I found last year’ lights - I’d never put them away w/the Xmas stuff, so it was a true Xmas miracle - but they were too few to do the new outlining job. The additional lights I’d picked up at the thrift for a buck only lit halfway along their strand so I bought yet another cheap strand and doubled that segment - almost… I now have a lovely door/porch outline except for one foot of blackout - and I just don’t have time to change that! Since no one comes to my house and it’s not really visible from the road, it’s not a big deal… and if folks want fancy Xmas lights, the guy around the bend has literally a half-acre display of moving scenes, inflatable creatures of Christian and pagan persuasion - it glows for a hundred feet above his house every night this season.

The garden has been abandoned for the year; I would like to say “put to bed” but my energy gave out before all the leaves and weeds - and there are no handymen who use rakes anymore… but it worked out, because the two inches of dead leaves were very insulating against the hard freeze last week… and hopefully the bugs will have eaten the weeds down to nubs by spring…

I’m still living in a town where a bumpsticker “Just Say No to Crack” refers to plumbers, and the new Chinese restaurant in town is called “Double Chen” -- their attempt at wordplay defeated by poor spelling… it’s a restful place. The guy at the gas station wore a Santa hat for Christmas; it was camoflage-colored but I suppose hunters just can’t bring themselves to wear red? The town’s lightposts displayed Cowboy Christmas decorations - boot and hat silhouettes with rakish poinsettas. I wonder what the Chinese who create these things think?

Anyway, I will try to get back to this at least every two weeks… just sign yourself up to be notified, and you won’t miss a thing…

Pre-Senior Moments

What is the official commencement date for senior moments? Is it when AARP starts sniffing up your Naturalizers? As a 50-something, I call myself middle-aged… so why aren’t they “midlife moments?” Or are those exclusively resolved for the jerks who run off with their buxom secretaries in a newly-bought red sportster?

I suppose this euphemism is reserved for memory glitches, like when I started the bread machine, commended myself on getting the setting right, then glanced over and noticed the bucket of batter was still on the counter. Or like just now, when I couldn’t manage to backspace and correct a typo without really stopping and focusing. Inflation has eaten into everything, and half a mind isn’t at all what it used to be.

In solidarity with the nation, I’ve lost my grip. Only this is literal - today I sent the toner catridge flying across the bathroom as I juggled the hypodermic filled with ink (yes, I’m a printing junkie) and tried to keep the open bottle of black indelible from re-painting my sink counter. Gravity and I have never been all that friendly, but now that it’s making a real boob of me, I’ve been searching through physics articles online for ways to fight back. But I always get distracted. Take this one:

One example of entanglement is the famous ‘EPR pairs’ (after Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen) If two electrons with complementary spin (if one is spin up, the other is spin down, and vice versa) are "paired" (both in superposition of both spin up and spin down) are separated by being sent along different wires, miles apart from each other, they each remain in superposition. However when one superpositioned electron is measured by a detector at its destination and reduces/collapses to a particular spin, (say spin up), its entangled twin miles away instantaneously reduces/collapses to the complement (spin down). The nonlocal effect has been verified with electron spin pairs, polarized photons and other quantum systems but remains unexplained.... Entire clouds of millions of atoms have been entangled. Non-local entanglement—referred to as ‘quanglement’ by Penrose—remains a fundamental mystery.

The only mystery to me is how they pick those twinned electrons out of a crowd - I mean, first those buggers are small and second they are fast! (or if you believe quantum, non-existent)... so how do they track this entanglement? How do you “tag” an electron? Does it even have an ear? Or do they dye them blue?

Anyway, sitting at the computer reading about particles so small that they make my retirement fund look big at least keeps me from dropping stuff. And I'm gonna re-read that paragraph a couple more times... I might be able to use it to explain why the ink went splat in the bathroom!

Seeds of the Future

Once again, I have dropped the thread of this blog, as the realities of a little homestead overtake me (okay - maybe a “stead-ette”). I’m tempted to follow the last post with more of the same - as I watch this harvest season so full of reaping the whirlwind. But I’m gonna stick closer to home; after all, I have more than enough of my own gaffes to work with. And if my retirement savings has now dwindled to the point that they are planning to shoot it around the center of the Large Hadron Collider, at least I have a freezer-full of badly preserved food to live on.

As the garden begins to wind down (which means the tomatoes, peppers, melons and eggplants sudden take notice of the weather and start blossoming, like a ne‘er do well child who at 54 decides to become a doctor, teasing his poor mother, breaking her heart), I am now into the seed saving phase. I am learning to recognize when seeds are ready to be gathered: about a day before I find those brown exploded husks on the ground by the dead plant. So far the only seeds I’ve been able to capture are the ones too big to get away, like beans and peas, and the ones that are so prolific as to be weeds, like calendula, marigold and lettuce. Not to say that I will be able to keep them over the winter (a jar of pea pods has turned black with mold -- if only I could find a mold-processing service who needs my harvesting skills!), but this is all part of my first year farming course: City Rube 101. Last week I celebrated the year anniversary of signing off on the counter offer to this place, and told myself how far I’d come from the days when I was driving down here, on the sly, before the deal was sealed, to mow the waist-high weeds and paint the eroded window sills before the rains started. Now I have waist-high buggy vegetables, and the window sills (and everything else!) on the main house are painted and snug - see the before/after photos (I think you can tell the difference). I did, as planned, treat myself to having contractors do the porch and the painting, and I am very happy with the results! Only 765 more projects to go!

Today I’m gonna keep this short, since I have 3 bags of bug-infested windfall apples to surgically prepare for cider, another quart or so of berries to preserve somehow (I might try berry-stuffed cabbage rolls) and the summer clothes to get up into the attic (finally bought a step ladder, a vast improvement over the knotted rope.) More later.

Morning After in America

I’m trying as hard as I can to ignore all this political hooha - we country folk have hogs to swill and hay to get in… alright, alright - but, I’ve got all the windows to caulk and the cat shit to get off the lawn… it’s the same idea. It’s a different world out here, and when I see all those swankers in their shiny suits and wide striped ties (when did wide ties come back? I’ve been out of the stores for too long…), I know that they don’t speak my language, nor I theirs.

But even I couldn't avoid some of the headlines recently and since we don’t have long now (it just seems like forever), I’ve got a few suggestions to help the campaigns. Firstly, Obama/Biden should be campaigning under the slogan, “Morning After in America” - riffing on the Bush comment that Wall St. got way drunk. Might as well give us the real story right up front -- we all have hell to pay. And that would leave the McCain group with “Hair of the Dog”. What we don’t know won’t hurt as it’s killing us.

Secondly, each winning campaign must vow not only to remove every last campaign sign, bulletin board and poster by one week after the election, but also to spend at least as much on social programs (aid to the poor, food kitchens, etc.) as they spent campaigning. And all the losing candidates are stuck rebuilding the bridges. It’s clear that they can afford it, and if that becomes the “loser’s task” each election, perhaps we’ll get fewer major millionaires in the race. Or maybe we just cycle them through: you pledge to give all your money to the general fund if you lose, and then you drop down to the level of the majority of the people you supposedly serve, and start again. If you’re a really good businesman, you might be able to afford to run twice in your life.

Okay, I can see there’s a fuzziness to my logic (it’s all the moss around here)… I’m happier at figuring out how long to boil the boysenberries to kill the mold than I am pondering the big questions like what slick theme song to follow X’s speech with, in order to ram home the message to the audience hindbrain, or whether to ban all the fat news correspondents from the campaign plane in order to save fuel. I don’t even want to know how much they are spending on the two conventions. It’s enough to know that I could live very comfortably on it for the rest of my life; heck, my whole town of 9,000 (no, it’s not Palin’s town, but just as rural) would be comfortable at least until the next election… why is it that recessions end up laying off all the steelworkers but hanging on to the marketing flacks? Because the Emperor’s New Clothes are made of the most expensive material there is - illusions ain’t cheap. But I’m sure that since both parties swear they’re the green party, they’re carefully packing up all those tall tales, sob stories and fun facts to recycle for 2012.