Do The Math

My Meadows

Sunday school over, I head to the river with my kayak. A cormorant couple is diving for fish and I hold my breath, waiting for them to surface. Seagulls float overhead in a clear blue sky punctuated by the remains of last nights moon. Gentle swells carry me up and down as I begin my trek. Crabbers wave then pull in their tasty haul. The tide is coming in so I paddle against the current until I reach the creek mouth. Then I use my paddle as rudder and just float along under the warm september sun.

Another day in the meadows. My meadows are fields of marsh grass and fragmites, with an occasional bunch of purple loosestrife, growing out of ripe and slimy, black sucking mud, hence the scientific name muck (mud + suck = muck). I’ve been prisoner to that muck up to my thighs and the smell…it takes a good scrubbing to get it off. The detritus of our civilization, the black mounds and the water runoff that is filtered here are teeming with wildlife.

Huge carp jump for an unlucky fly while minnows sparkle and splash silver like a handful of coins thrown into the brackish water. The shy blue heron alights then flies away just as I float near, always staying two steps ahead while the even shyer fiddler crabs, with their muscle bound claw, quickly scramble sideways into their burrows. The muskrats too are rarely seen but their myriad tunnels through grass and mud are everywhere, and are the roots of many small side branches of this creek.

Overhead swifts jet through the air and the blackbirds surprise with their flash of red wing. Monarchs are out and about. Their orange wings a beautiful contrast against the sky. A yellow butterfly flits at the edge of my vision, as does the knowledge that I must return home.

OOOOOO I Want One

This looks so fun.  Much better than the jet ski.  You can land or take off in 750 feet from water or land.  It takes regular gas, getting about 20 miles a gallon with a range of around 350 miles. The toys that are coming to fruition now are the things I dreamt about as a kid.  I guess I'll just keep dreaming because the price tag is $140,000.00.

Click on the title to go to the company website.

God IS Nice

I prayed with my son while driving him to school just as I always do. This day I included myself and my need for relief from chronic pain as it has been especially restricting and really affecting me mentally. I usually don’t pray for things for myself except in the heat of the moment or as it relates to my work of caring for others and the things my patients need from me.

After dropping him off I went to the gas station. I pulled in and asked for “forty dollars cash regular” from the ubiquitous smiling Pakistani with the thick accent and a turban on his head. While gassing up, I was reading my devotions, electronically stored on my Treo. Today’s bit was titled “Friendship with God” and it went on to explain what a true friendship with God means as referred to in Genisis 18, how a right relationship with Him brings a life of “freedom, liberty, and delight.”

The gas handle clicked and the pump man came over to me and took my money and smiling, he said “God is nice.”

And do you know what? He REALLY IS nice. He let me know that He was my friend, that He was with me and told me twice in only a few minutes, first in written words and then, right after, spoken by a smiling messenger with a thick accent pumping my gas.

This Morning I Was Reading

This morning I was reading poetry. My mind kept wandering down a path of regret and here is what I was thinking:

All those poems gone, I wrote for years, through high school and beyond into my 20’s and I littered notebooks with all the screaming sorrow and confusion and isolation that filled me until I exploded, or rather imploded, and began again as an empty vessel. Now I know my writing was good, like my drawings, but all of it, the drawings and the writings, I kept in secret shame just as I did my life. One day I got married and the next day (well almost…6 months later) divorced and that dark, storm cloud of a man destroyed all the pieces of paper...the spiral bound, loose leaf, bright white, stationary...that told the tale of my prior existence, the story of a girl who wasn’t me, a girl who was only a figment of a life I left rotting in a dank basement because it wouldn’t burn and all attempts to drown it failed because it could swim very well. It did bleed, but not enough to kill it. I tried slow annihilation but it finally just had to get lost, somewhere, like the poems and pencils and pieces of a person. I hope it leaves me alone.