Friday, October 31, 2008

Halloween Morning

It's the pre-dawn hour of Halloween day. I got to the shop today at 5:30 am so that I could get everything prepped for the day, have time to put on my costume AND.....try it out for a few minutes to make sure that i won't be breaking my neck pulling it off.

I just stripped down in the back room, pulled out the legwarmers, shivered at the sight of my little hot pant/gym shorts, zipped up the warm up jacket, considered the afro wig and laced up these forty pound roller skates. I'm about ten inches taller behind the counter now and get to do all those fun little loopty loops all day while rolling around.

Just put on Pandora funk, unlocked the door and now I wait for the first customer.... and hope that they're dressed more ridiculously than I am right now.

Thursday, October 9, 2008

A Necessary Wednesday

It's a slow week here.... the college is on break so town is a little less populated. One of my girls, a student who has her first apartment and rent that's due, offered to take more shifts this week, so those of us who aren't students offered up whatever we could. I gave her my Wednesday opening shift so that I could take just one day off from waking up in the dark and maybe spend the day however I'd like. I asked a good friend to come and hike our new land with me. My house was clean... a pretty unusual thing these days.... so I didn't feel like I had to spend the day putting life back together on the homefront. I took a bit of time to place the food orders for the shop (from my couch) and check off my short list of things to do. Everybody (Bill and Ella) went away and I made myself some hot water with lemon, scratched my dog's belly and sat on the living room floor with a book until Annette arrived.

It was one of those epic fall days when the sun is warm and the leaves fall slowly from the trees like Japanese cherry blossoms. It's that time of year when all you can do is inhale the smell of the soil and composting leaves because too soon it will all be buried beneath several layers of snow. We hiked, we talked and talked and talked and grew this ever growing friendship, I got us lost for a good forty minutes.... having veered us offtrail and then not being entirely sure whether we were heading back toward civilization or off into the next county over seven or so miles of mountain terrain..... and.... we somehow ended up back at the fork in the stream where we started out in the first place.... the rush of a waterfall at our backs and a big, wide 100 acre piece of land at our feet and fingertips.

The hieffers nuzzled Annette's outstretched hands the cats curled around our ankles at our return. The sun was still high in the sky. We realized that the monarchs had a great big outburst of existence and so when Annette's car pulled away down the drive I took off my boots, ducked under the fence line and hunkered down in the overgrown milkweed and red clover of the pasture while dozens and dozens of butterflies went about their business. When Ella got off the schoolbus and came up the drive, I led her under the fenceline with me and sat her down in the feild. After fifteen seconds she started to see them... one after the other after the other....making their way from red clover blossom to another.... and it was one of those things neither of us will probably ever forget. There were sooo many!

It was one of those fall days that served as a kind of tonic preceeding the winter. Something to put a little heat in the belly and in the heart before we descend into deep freeze. A day to file the sun deep into the crevices of our skin and memory. A day to take off your shoes and make one last imprint in the front yard grasses.

Thanks, Jess, for taking my shift.