Exercise

This writing everyday like it's a journal isn't really working. I can't write unselfconsciously. I can't make the time. I am thinking about things I should write, phrases and ideas and then because they come to me when my hands are full I don't write them down and then they are gone. My mind is mushy with hormones. I can't remember anything and it makes me wonder why we hold memory up as this thing that is so important. Why do we mourn memory loss of the demented and alzheimed, in the the brain damaged and the afflicted? I say good riddance! It's the past, it's gone, it's ether, this moment is all there is.

I am going home next week to the place I grew up, to the town that exists solely in my memory. The town has changed a lot in the 36 years since I lived there. I had mixed feelings about the whole trip. It's a long way and the drive is slightly treacherous. My childhood was filled with stories of horrible car crashes so my mind goes right there. I lost a friend in the second grade to a camper fire—I saw her Friday, Saturday she was dead—it happened in the night when the children were all asleep in the cab-over of some shitty camper and the gas leaked and the whole thing blew up. A fiery crash on some deserted stretch of the Yellowhead 16.

A childhood friends father died tonight. I saw it on facebook. I've been in contact with her, he had cancer. He was a good guy, totally dedicated to his kids. Oh my god he was handsome and so sexy. I thought so at ten. He was a truck driver some times his daughter and I would sleep in his king size water bed in his purple satin sheets. He was an operator I guess but he was her dad and he was there even when he wasn't. They had animals and an unfinished split level house that we used to bring her ponies into. The living room had Hawaiian scene wallpaper, oversize bean-bag furniture, and shag carpet, it was nirvana. We ran wild of course. It was the 1970's and no one's parents were keeping track of the kids. We slept in barns and drove trucks we weren't supposed to, and we rode those damn ponies all over hell's half acre.

It's Wednesday now. The weekend is over, my husband only left this morning to take the long drive into the city to do his radio show. I got up and took the dogs for a little walk in the yard and I let out the chickens. I combined the flocks two days ago and the new girls are still miffed and confused. Only one of them figured out to go into the coop last night, I carried the other five by hand. I am confident tonight will be better. Hens are so mean to each other and especially to the new residents. There's no welcome wagon let's show you around approach. It's more like I am going to peck you and steal your food because that's what I do. Only once has one of my hens taken a foundling literally under her wing and that chicken now enjoys second place in the flock behind the three oldest hens and above the pair of year old hens, a Cochin and a Royal Buttercup. Gingers and Freckles (three of each name) are just 4 months old, still not laying and are now going to bed at night nervous and exhausted in a strange land at the bottom of the pecking order.

The weather has been perfect for an entire month and even though the days are shortening slightly it's still light until 9 o'clock and the temperature is consistently pleasant. I am satiated by summer.