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| MY shaggy grass |
My
first glance out the window by my desk this morning was a tad discouraging—wet sidewalks,
cloudy skies, and long, long grass. The grass in the front lawn is okay, a mix
of Bermuda and St. Augustine that has gone dormant for winter, but in the back,
we have winter rye, lush and green and lovely up to a point. The yard service owner
said last week he thought it was growing an inch a day in this rain. Ours hadn’t
been mowed in three weeks, because it rained every time our turn to be mowed
came up. It occurred to me that three things at my house were shaggy—the grass,
the dog, and me. Tonight, the grass is short. Sophie and I are still shaggy.
Not
sure how to describe today. It began to go south when I discovered that my
printer was shooting out blank sheets of paper. After much tearing of hair,
prowling on settings and devices and troubleshooting and finally calling my
computer genius son-in-law, I discovered it was the black ink cartridge. And it’s
all my fault. Somehow when I last changed the cartridge, I re-installed the old
one and threw away the new one. Yikes! A $50 mistake! I have ordered a new one
from Amazon, and it is to come Friday.
I actually
broke quarantine this morning and went to Carshon’s deli to pick up an order. It
was like driving in a ghost town, so little traffic. At the deli, we got
curbside service, but Stephanie , who brought the order out, says they have no
business. I am so sorry. Hope it doesn’t crater the business. I’ve been eating
there over fifty years. My oldest son thinks no trip home is complete without a
stop at Carshon’s. It’s a fixture in our lives.
Jacob
went with me, but he was pretty monosyllabic, in spite of my attempts to start
bright conversations. His excuse was
that at ten o’clock, he’d just woken up. Tomorrow they are supposed to get
schoolwork.
Spent
a lot of time checking authors for my monthly column in Lone Star Literary
Life, only to have the editor tell me I’d somehow missed several newer books
when I reported that several authors only had much older books. So tomorrow I
have to backtrack and re-do what I did today. Only bright spot was that I got
in touch with an old friend who has new books coming out.
To add
to my day of minor annoyances, Sophie, who is almost nine and should know
better, has suddenly taken to retrieving used Kleenex from the bathroom wastebasket
and strewing it about the living room. It’s not a huge problem, as I have a
grabber to pick it up—but it is, to repeat myself, an annoyance. And she knows
it. When I start to pick one up, she’ll grab it and run, with a furtive look at
me. Sometimes I think this and some of her other behaviors are her way of
acting out the underlying tension she feels in all of us. I would tell you I’m
not anxious and on the surface I’m not, but the virus is always there in the
back of my mind. Yours too?
I’m
having fun using up leftovers. For way too long, one giant baking potato has
been staring at me in my bowl of onions and potatoes. It even started to grow
little green sprouts, as if to remind me it needed attention. Tonight I baked
it, mixed it with plenty of butter and grated cheddar, those last tiny slices
of bacon in the freezer, some rapidly wilting scallions that I had to trim way
back to find usable onion. Bound the whole thing together with sour cream and
had a feast. The other half of the stuffed potato is in the fridge. One day I’ll
run out of leftovers, but for now cleaning out my stash is an enjoyable challenge.
Enough
prattling. Sweet dreams and pray for sunshine tomorrow. It’s supposed to go
into the eighties.
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