No Pictures

I sat down here and realized that I took no pictures today.  Not of birds, not of squirrels, not of knitting, not of the sky.  My day was filled with things to do, none of them photogenic.  

First thing this morning the exterminator came to check the traps.  In my attic, no mice.  In E&MD's attic, no mice.  In my basement, no mice.  He left all the attic traps in place and took five of them out of my basement and put them in E&MD's basement.  He'll be back next Thursday for the final trap checking and, I assume, trap removal (since I am not able to climb up into the attic to retrieve them or mouse corpses).  I hope that there are mice next week otherwise this will have been a very expensive fishing expedition.

As soon as he left I hopped into the car and went off to get a haircut which I desperately needed.  After the haircut I stopped at Zambaldi to visit DS and I got to have a sample of his latest beer experiment.  I don't remember the style of beer but he said it will have extra alcohol content when it's ready and he put a few pounds of chipotle peppers into the boil then strained them out.  The beer has a nice smoky flavor with a tiny tingle in the aftertaste.  It's interesting and hopefully other people who actually drink beer will think so too.

On my way home I swung through Goodwill donations to drop off the past week's tosses.

This evening I Zoomed with a few knitting guild friends, just knitting and chatting mostly about the vote counting, until the Packer game started when everyone else left to watch the game.

05 November--Barbara Malcolm, The Seaview. 

I never knew what brought the memory of Jim back so strongly that day.  Maybe it was just the aroma of the wind off the sea but all of a sudden there were tears in my eyes and my heart felt cracked in half.  "Oh, Jim," I said to the sand, "I wish you were here to do all of this with me."  In my mind's eye, I saw him up on a ladder painting or sitting hunched over a newspaper-covered table with all of the old locks from all over the Seaview spread out in front of him getting cleaned and oiled. 

            Weeks went by when I thought of Jim but the thoughts didn't stab my insides like they did today.  My hand shook as I dashed away the tears sliding down my cheeks. 

            Smells had always brought the most vivid memories so I turned my head to see if I could find out what aromas floated on the air and where they came from.  Or had the memory been sparked by that darkly tanned, gray bearded man who'd walked by and wished me "good morning" that day? 

            I missed Jim's icy blue eyes that were so startling in his deeply tanned face and his ready smile that split his beard and made his eyes sparkle.  He called me his "bride" and always said that when he was growing up Pappy, his dad, had said his next wife would be a little German fraulein and that all the English she would know would be "yah, Papa."  Jim joked that he'd married a German fraulein but she knew a lot more English words and none of them were "yah, Papa."  There was always a little catch in his voice when he told that story because even forty years after Pappy died, Jim still missed him every day.  Now I knew how he felt. 

            I sat down on the steps of the Seaview's porch with my toes in the sand and closed my eyes.  I imagined that I felt him sit beside me, bump my shoulder, and say, "How're you doing, Bride?"  I would bump him back and say, "Not too bad, Jimbo."  He'd smell of sweat and sawdust with a little WD-40 thrown in and we'd decide to ditch the rest of the day's work and go for a swim.  I opened my eyes and looked to my side slightly surprised not to see him there.  I shrugged and stood to go to my room, change into my swimsuit, and go for a swim for the two of us.  My tears would be absorbed in the salty seawater.

That was my day, none of it worthy of a picture.  I spent an hour transcribing part of an old story for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) then took a shower to wash off all the little pieces of hair that go everywhere.  And I just realized that I forgot to find something to toss today.  Sorry about that.

--Barbara