My future, by A. My past, by me.

"I just pictured really really ugly children that are really dirty from farming who think they are cool but aren't and I'm talking like mangled ugly children and I hope that isn't your future" - A

In other news, it smells like the end of summer in the town I grew up in. I could be any age from four to now smelling this smell. I could be buying the new markers on my school supply list or wondering what high school will be like or walking to the farm down the road for barley sugar turkey shaped lollipops with my babysitter or making a collage of binder cover art smelling this smell. After being in an unfamiliar place all year it surprises me when things like smells can be so familiar.

Clamdar, Clam Tsar

Today the waves were rough and wild and close together, the kind where you have to dive under the crashing froth quickly and surface as soon as possible with no time to wipe the water from your eyes before opening them to see the next wave bearing down. First I had daddy-daughter ocean time which was just like all those summers of my youth and then I went in with Y and Pa and M and the girls all had serious little bikini big ocean syndrome but modesty seemed so petty and we had to stop caring. I was in there so long I stopped being able to talk and got all wobbly and couldn't walk straight. Pa said it made her feel high, and while I don't know what being high is really like I imagine it would be pretty similar to how I felt.

All Creatures Great and Small

When I was little Gram introduced me to James Herriot's books about his life as a vet in the English countryside. She had all his books in the bookshelves in Southold and I ended up reading them over and over. I cried for most of her funeral but when the lady started singing All Things Bright and Beautiful I really could not keep myself together. I started crying again a little when I found the song on youtube BUT that is not the point of the story.

The point of the story is that my farm class teacher emailed me about an opportunity to work with a flock of sheep next year. My favorite parts of the books were the lambing scenes. I don't know why I had such a thing for lambing back then, maybe it's the same reason why I have such a thing for lambing now, but I guess the reasons don't really matter because here I am with the chance to do real life lambing this February.

SUMMER!

There is so much happiness in swimming naked in a huge warm ocean. The waves weren't huge, but they were there. The water was a murky green soup with all kinds of floating seaweed, but sometimes a little opacity isn't so bad. And there I was, nineteen and naked and bobbing in that big August bathtub of an ocean, feeling free and youthful and tiny and powerful and powerless and connected.

And then chicken wings! Barbecue with Y and T's family! Sitting out in the backyard with a candle! Burning the plastic wick of S's parents' electric candle. Chilly goats and an imaginary trip to Costa Rica.

Yum. What a day.

Penguins and teeth and Henrietta the chicken

I still feel comforted every time a woman walks by smelling like my third grade teacher's perfume. I wonder what she would think if she knew.

Welcome to my fronteir

I had never made tapioca pudding before but I really wanted some so I made up a recipe and went for it and it turned out great. I feel so hardcore!

LOOK EVERYONE I'M A FOOD BLOGGER, I MAKE UP RECIPES AND POST THEM ON MY BLOG!

1 cup tapioca
2 cups water
1 can coconut milk
1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla

First I put the tapioca in a pot, added the two cups of water, and soaked it for 10 minutes. Then I added the can of coconut milk, the salt, the sugar, and the vanilla and brought it all to a boil. Once it boiled I reduced the heat and let it cook for a while more until it seemed done, and then I stirred in the beaten egg and cooked it for a few more minutes. Then I put some in a bowl and sliced up some mango and put it on top.

Good decision.

And I suppose this is a little unrelated, but JULIE ANDREWS! YOU MINX YOU!

Reading my book reading my book

Shelley was the poet of that time of life when men feel most strongly the sense of proud and lonely inviolability, which is legible in everything he wrote, and when their spirits, like his, are also "tameless and swift and proud." And this is a time of life and magic that, once gone, is gone forever, and that may never be recaptured save by memory.
But in the years that followed, just as Eugene's physical body grew coarser and more heavy, and his sensual appetites increased enormously, so also did the energy of his spirit, which in childhood had been wing-like, soaring, and direct in its aerial buoyancy, grew darker, slower, heavier, smoldering and slow in its beginning heat, and densely woven and involved in all its web-like convolutions.
And as all the strength and passion of his life turned more and more away from its childhood thoughts of aerial flight and escape into some magic and unvisited domain, it seemed to him that the magic and unvisited domain was the earth itself, and all the life around him - that me must escape not out of life but into it, looking through walls he never had seen before, exploring the palpable and golden substance of this earth as it had never been explored, finding, somehow, the word, the key, the door, to the glory of a life more fortunate and happy than any man has ever known, and which yet, incredibly, palpably, is his, even as the earth beneath his feet is his, if he could only take it.

Oh god

I literally just cried reading Dooce's birth story.

Bugs and blackberries

I went out to the yard for only a few minutes to pick some blackberries for blackberry cobbler but the combination of mosquitoes and thorns was utterly ridiculous. I really did not want to be a princess about mosquitoes and thorns but now my legs are on fire but I am not touching them I am not touching them I AM NOT TOUCHING THEM.