then you really might know what it’s like

So these days I am living with my mom and dad at their house in Montana. This is two things, concurrently.

It is: 1) undeniably awful living with my parents and 2) completely fantastic living in their house.

Every morning I wake up at around 10:30. I lounge around in bed, diddling the internet and quite often also myself, exchanging morning texts with Theodore and generally being a big, bed-ridden bum until 11:30. Then I head upstairs to the most well-equipped, perfectly naturally lit kitchen that I have personally ever partaken in. I proceed to set a pot of water (plus a little vinegar and salt) to boil while reaching into the freezer for my favorite coffee beans (Organic Aztec Dark, lately) which I grind up and throw into the french press while I wait for the water to boil. Once it’s boiling I swirl the water gently and crack two freshly-laid, freshly-delivered by my wonderful sister eggs into the water and they swirl about and the vinegar smell prickles the inside my nose and I smile, then turn around to grab the bread off the island, throw it in the toaster, and then walk around the island to the fridge where I collect a carton of cream, pour it about 1/5th of the way up the biggest mug I can find, stir some brown sugar into it, taste it, taste it again because I like it so much, and then taste it a third time and then admonish myself that there won’t be any cream left for the coffee if I keep eating it out of a spoon! Then, the toast pops up and I hurry over to the toaster, reach up to the cabinets to grab a plate, toss the toast on the plate and quickly butter it then rush a bit back toward the stove to fish out my poached eggs with a slotted device that reads, “Kitchamajigger” in scrolling font across the front of it. (I love this device.) Then I sit down at the shiny, honey-colored wooden kitchen table bathed in the noon sunlight and proceed to pop my yolks, spread them all about, salt my eggs, eat them, and then profoundly enjoy my coffee.

I always make my mom one poached egg on toast, and we usually share this breakfast/lunch moment with each other while talking about our plans for the day.

After this I usually disappear back into the basement for awhile and diddle around on the internet a bit more, eventually realizing that until I make a list of the things I need to accomplish for the day I am never going to start. So I list them, then set about getting them done. Today I promptly smoked a bowl, donned a woven sun hat, set my ipod to the audiobook that I am currently reading (Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates by Tom Robbins which I am finding to be slightly repulsive, incredibly enlightening and his flexible use of langauge delights me.)
Then I headed out for the garden, where I sat in the 60-degree, sunny and windy weather and filtered through a 10×15 foot patch of dirt, sifting and overturning and digging and shrieking when worm encounters were too close for comfort and pinching weeds with two sets of fingers on two different hands and pulling subtly, gently until they come free and I smile at discovering the depth of their roots and I pile them all into a white bucket, smooshing them down with my flat palm so I can fit more and I don’t have to get up so often to empty it. My fingertips are raw and calluses are just beginning and it feels so good at the end to wash all of the dirt out from under my fingernails by digging the nails into the soap in such a way that it forces the dirt out, soap in it’s place, pressing insistently at the tender skin under my nails until I wash it out and scrub my hands clean.

After gardening I came inside and was watching Seinfeld with my Dad when my sister and nephew came in and said they were going to go for a walk in the coulee. I put shoes on and headed out with them. The hill we walked down was just slipping green up through the golden refuse left behind by winter, and the green set off the blue in the sky and the white snow in the mountains in an incredible glowing fashion. We also found wildflowers, some of my favorites: shooting stars, blue-bells, crocuses, and yellow-bells and my nephew wanted to pick them all but sister and I kept insisting, “No! You want to leave them so they’ll be back next year!” So he carried on, looking for things to shoot with his bow and arrow. (We had to keep reminding him, sometimes in panicky tones, not to shoot in the vicinity of the two dogs.) We walked down and around the pond and the two yellow labs swam in the water and happily shook their watery behinds all over us and lolled about with their smiles wide and sprints jaunty. The forest protected us from the wind but we could hear it in the needles of the ponderosa pines, sounding much like surf crashing mildly on a cool, sandy, pacific-northwestern beach somewhere. Nephew had a bit of a fit when we asked him to tie his shoes, he refused because he wanted his mom to do it for him (he is seven) and we walked away from him and “left him” to his bit of fit and sat a ways up the hill, in the meadow, with the sun shining on us and the dogs rolling around next to us. Then we paid a visit to the structure that I and a few friends built by leaning an incredibly industrious number of sticks against each other to form a tee-pee shaped fort with walls as thick as ten sticks! And he showed me how he and his friend had made a window and I approved of the improvement and then we walked across the field to get home.

We had croissants for dinner with cream cheese, smoked salmon, sliced tomatoes and capers along with artichokes dipped in butter and clementines. (Flourless chocolate cake for desert with a strawberry whipped cream. I made them the other night for the dinner party and oh man they are delicious.)

Then I came downstairs, smoked some more pot, went upstairs to tell mom the list of things I need her to grab at the store tomorrow so I can make dinner, and Dad came in and started telling me about the time he spent in Japan and like every other conversation I’ve had with him, 94% of the material was stories I’ve heard at least 60 or 70 times already but because I was stoned it was a bit more tolerable than usual.

Anyhow that pretty much takes me to where I am right now. Sitting here with my kitty curled up with her nose tucked into her stomach, on my lap, typing this entry out on my computer and about to watch the new South Park because it’s funny and I’m stoned.

<3clea