Island Citizen

I had a very big day
I took myself out to breakfast and ordered a swiss cheese and mushroom omelette and roasted potatoes had one bite of each while watching the low tide on the Saratoga Passage and managed to keep both bites down then took the rest home in a box

then I took a big bag of clothes and shoes and books to CASA (the animal shelter where Jupiter and I discovered one another) for their flea market next weekend and perused their bake sale with the bites of egg and potato fighting each other in my belly

then I drove to Orchard's Nursery (come on that is the funniest name for a business EVER and it truly is their name) and bought myself my magnolia finally FINALLY!!! it is formally named a Marilyn Magnolia but I have named it Marylinn here it is not yet planted (you would have laughed at me had you seen me wrestle the beast into Sweet Lime I know because several burly men stood around and laughed at me as I thought it through (I put the front passenger seat of Sweet Lime all the way back then put Marylinn in the front seat and put her top through the open back window behind the driver's seat) I envisioned it I saw it spatially goddamn it and it worked perfectly then those burly men (none of whom offered to help because they could see I did not welcome their help and would not have let them help had they offered) welcomed me into their sweaty-balled ham-fisted manly club with an actual round of applause then I drove home and wrangled her out of Sweet Lime and carried her to the back yard and stuck her where she's going to live though I did not plant her because by then my back was screaming at me and I felt muscles that are not even actually muscles

here is where she'll live tomorrow or next week whenever I take enough hot baths to ease the sore out of my back I took this photo from my deck so she looks smaller than she is

here is what her fragrant blooms will look like probably next spring

after all that wrestling I realized I had broken two fingernails not in a tragic way just in the kind of way that if I touched a child he'd scream in fear thinking a raggy-ass finger monster was after him so I went to the Bait and Tackle shop to get a manicure from Anna who always calls me Mary and she is so adorable and quiet and our conversations are so funny that I won't ever correct her and after she cleaned me up and started painting my nails she said are you going to prom tonight? which made me laugh so hard I almost puked (actually almost puked and yes prom is tonight) and when I get laughing it's horrifying like a tortured farm animal I COULD.NOT.STOP. and the rest of the women in the tiny salon started laughing so I described my pink dress and how I had to go get my hair put up and how I was going to walk around prom telling dancing children to make sure they left enough space between their bodies for the holy spirit and I just had so much fun because even though I am no good among people I am very good among people for an extremely short amount of time

after that I went to the Boy Scout car wash where they made a mess of Sweet Lime and all the fathers were yelling at the boys which made me kind of sad which reminds me I lost control of the cart I was moving Marylinn on and got my first scratch on Sweet Lime and I'm relieved because when you have a new car you keep waiting for that first ding or scratch and once it's over you can kind of relax at least that's how it's always been for me

after that I followed a sign reading BARN SALE which took me to a brand new part of the island and I don't know what I thought I'd find in that BARN SALE but it was no regulation garage sale they had saddles and tack and fishing rods and reels and bicycles and I found those blocks up top and the Barn Lady said they were $5 and very old (I mentioned the two missing blocks whose holes were filled with blocks from another smaller puzzle) and I told her I really wanted them but I only had $1.43 in my pocket and she let me have it for $1.43 even though I had a twenty dollar bill also in my pocket which pleased the Used Car Salesman's Daughter in me no end and it is beautiful and will look stunning in the library and I think Henry would have loved it and there are four nursery rhymes on this block set

on the way home from the BARN SALE I saw this very sad goat I have raised goats from babies up and rams too and no way should a goat EVER have a chain around its neck no way never I parked a little bit down the road in a thicket of blackberry bushes thinking I could free the goat from his chain but the place was surrounded in barbed wire also sad poor little goat also there were a whole pile of free alpacas and llamas in the field behind the sad goat they have no chains not one

Oh! I have strawberries

after all this excitement I went to the grocery store to buy all the things I need to make a Raspberry Galette Bretonne with Honey Vanilla Pastry Cream but I was so hungry by the time that I got home I had eaten an entire box of raspberries so I'm just going to make the pastry which has sour cream in it and refrigerate it overnight fruit is easy on my stomach as long as it doesn't have skin so raspberries and diet Sprite for dinner I'll get more raspberries tomorrow

I've come to the end of my very long tale

Love to you Darklings who keep coming back I want you to know that even when I'm puking my guts out I am soaking in happiness all the time which is why I haven't been writing much I am filling my well tomorrow I plan on driving to Seattle to the first farmer's market of the season if I can and if I can