No Fog

For the first day this week we didn't have freezing fog, just thick overcast.  Things sure look dreary in the gray light of these days.  It's so dim I keep expecting the automatic nightlight to be on in the bathroom.

Look at this bird.  The light looks like late afternoon, doesn't it?  But it's 10 o'clock this morning.  I was glad to see this Junco at the feeder but think it looks like an artist's "study in grays."

I spent part of the morning folding a basket of laundry and then the rest of the day trying to get words down on paper.  I think my brain is broken, the writing part of it anyway.  I can't seem to get any fiction written, I'm not having ideas, and it's making me crazy.  I took the pieces of the sonnet and, ignoring the form, tried to rearrange them into a better poem.  No luck.  But I'm going to keep at it.  I know a lot of words, I should be able to make them do what I want them to do.

This afternoon I started January Preemie Hat #1 and finished it at Friday Night Knitting.  It's tiny, tinier than usual.  I wonder if I used the wrong size needles... but it'll fit some baby.  They come in all sizes, you know.

 

 

 08 January--Barbara Malcolm, The Seaview. 

            Climbing back up from the beach was harder than I thought it would be.  It surprised me that all the work I'd been doing over the last months hadn't gotten me into better shape.

            "Sorry I made these steps so steep," Iggy said as he came up beside me, breathing hard too.

            "When you cut the steps you probably couldn't imagine being older and less fit than you were... when?  When you were thirty?"

            He laughed.  "Twenty-five."

            We caught our breath and walked to the house.  I watched him clean the barracuda on a fish-cleaning table away from the house, then bone and skin it.  Gulls arrived to squabble over the leavings.  He sent me into the house for a specific glass bowl.  "Glass doesn't hold the fish smell," he said when I asked why that particular bowl.  We each worked to cut the fish into bite size pieces, carefully scraping out any bones left in the flesh.

            After hosing off the table he carried the bowl inside where we cut up and added an onion, bell peppers and a tiny piece of hot pepper, celery, a cucumber on its last day that Iggy found in the fridge, two tomatoes, a little salt, a little pepper, and lots and lots of fresh squeezed lime juice. We ended up with a lot more ceviche than I thought we'd get with one smallish barracuda.

            As I stood at the sink washing dishes and watching a pair of middle-aged women stroll by on the road, Iggy came up behind me putting his arms around my waist.

            He nuzzled my neck.  "I think we have time for a little relaxation before the party."

            I smiled down into the dishwater at the euphemism.  "I'm feeling pretty relaxed already," I said.

            His hands wandered up to my breasts and I felt him stir against my backside.  "Myself I am feeling tense.  Maybe we can think of a way to help me relax?"

            I lifted my hands from the dishwater and turned in his embrace, draping my dripping arms around his neck.  "Oh, I think together we might figure something out."

Today's toss was another trivia game. I feel like I'm running out of easy to toss stuff.  Maybe I'll have to start digging deeper.  Yikes.

--Barbara