The Worm Hole at the Piggly Wiggly

I walked into a grocery store this week in a town that I don't go to often. I lived there once, in a world that seems so far removed from me now. It was just going to be quick stop to get green peanuts for a boil. It was 2025 when I walked in, but within seconds, it was 1971.

The throwback hit first with the smell of the store, it was as if the concrete walls had absorbed the decades bygone.

The aisles were laid out the same, people talked in the aisles like they did in the 70's and 80's. I could see my grandmother in a wool cap on a hot June day mulling over the smoked meats looking for a few good pieces to cook her beans. I saw my mother arguing with the meat manager about bologna she bought that went bad too soon (she was a Karen), all of us kids would disappear when she lit into someone.

Grave stands and bright colored funeral flowers lined the top of the frozen food aisle as they always had. And I saw my own kids begging for a quarter to get Tootsie Pops at the register. I went out the door and looked to the left, half expecting to see the mechanical pony that the girls used to ride while they ate those lollipops. It was gone, but not really, the imprint from my memory conjured it again.

I got into the car, Don was waiting. as I opened the door and looked at him, I realized that he wasn't part of those memories. We have been together for 41 years, how could he not have been with me? Am I really old as Methuselah?

I told him how surreal that little run was, it was as if I had fallen into a worm hole. Memories are strange, powerful, terrible and beautiful things aren't they?

I hope your memories, your dejavu, your conjuring's of mind soul and body are as blessed as mine on my favorite day.

Muse musings

I love that Don and I can dream together. That I can bring up crazy questions and he will play along with me. Questions like this from last night, inspired by a photo of a cliff that looked like one from Avatar, a lone man standing atop it and a small beaten path that seemed to be carved out for his trek alone. 

"If you could go remove all manmade obstacles, and tourist from a single place to have just to yourself, where would you go?"   

Yes, that is my muse asking — she has kept me content that I can see without going. That's what imagination can do. I know who my muse is, without a doubt. I walk with her and talk with her every chance I get, Creation. She is outside of every window I peer out. Every door that is closed is Narnia's portal.

My muse opens the jetties for me, fills me with inspiration, makes me believe in impossibilities, tells me not to confine myself to the grounded plains, to a calendar of years, but to reach now, today, for the skies, the treetops and beyond. 

She's taught me to see what lies beneath the plastic and metal rebar and pylons. I can mentally remove everything from a scene. The big house on the peninsula, the dock, the boat, the cell towers, mosquitoes, and then, there it is — creation. The tundra is no longer private with million dollar price tags, it belongs to all of us, and always leads me to the ultimate creator. 

I've been blessed to live in some beautiful places and there are some that I've longed to visit so badly, so long forgotten, not even on an  an Atlas. I want to trek there by foot, like a nomad, holding a stick to a ground charged with the long dead sinew of the extinct eastern Chestnut, and the nascent frozen tundra of the ice age beneath it. My stick with a point would remove all obstacles and trappings of man along the way. Yes, that would be my superpower, busting obstacles. 

And — all of this while I plan what I'm cooking for dinner.  Can y'all tell I'm reading The Chronicles of Narnia? lol. Read books, get inspired. 

The photo is mine, taken at Biltmore, Asheville. 

Mama Got A Squeeze Cloth, Daddy Never Sleeps at Night.

 

I was pulling my "squeeze towel" down to twist all of the excess water out of the squash to make our squash fritters today. I keep those old cotton threadbare towels for just this purpose, mostly because I don't like the feel of cheesecloth on my hands, I know, that's weird.

Anyway, I looked at the towel and laughed, thinking of the similarities in the old worn out rag and myself. We've both wiped a tear or two, wiped up a hot mess, been washed of it all, and hung out to dry fresh and renewed.