Glorious Sunshine

Okay, so it's not crummy outside to keep me inside, but I'm determined to get some submitting done today before I go outside to play with the weeds in the garden. Writing work first, dirt-y work second. I want to totally annihilate the weeds before I rent a Mantis tiller to work in the bags of Miracle Gro Garden Soil we got to try and revitalize our worn out garden soil. Anybody know how to make veggies grow and kill weeds at the same time? Yeah, me neither, but I'm going to give it a shot again this year. Maybe I'll see how landscape fabric works... I've got some in the garage. I just hate the idea of covering up the soil so it can't breathe. Maybe I'll just stick with laying down newspaper in layers and piling on lawn clippings for mulch, but that might be the genesis of some of the garden weeds. Why am I not rich enough to hire a gardener and able to reap the rewards without all the work? I so deserve that. Oh, yeah, writing. Here you go...

April 30--Brac Island, Croatia. There was barely a square yard of sand on Zlatni Rat that wasn't covered by a body, a beach towel, or a lounge chair. Gloria picked her way over and around more middle-aged, Middle-European flesh exposed to the watery sunshine than she had ever dreamed of seeing. She had never imagined that she would live someplace other than the United States, much less that she would meet and marry a Croatian soccer player at her small college on the other side of the state from her childhood home, or that her new husband would get a job back in his home country of Croatia. Doesn't everyone want to live in the US? No one had ever heard of the country except for other Croatians and a handful of geography nerds. Things had happened to fast, there was the wedding, the honeymoon, and boom, here they were living in a country she still had trouble finding on the map. As she waited in their tiny apartment waiting for her husband to come home and take her to the market she wondered how she had ended up here and, on her darkest days, how much she really loved Tico anyway.

Well, that's a mess, isn't it? See? Writing's not all sunshine and flowers, sometimes it's tangled words and lame ideas.
--Barbara