World on Fire

Two nights ago we stood on the hill and watched the fires flare up to the west. The route I used to drive to work every night was a nightmare. I won’t be going that way for a while. There’s a town out in the wheat fields, where we used to stop as we escaped the confines of our lockdown just to look at stuff. Well, now there isn’t a town. It’s been very sad this week. It’s all around us.

It happens every year. People act like it never happens. It always happens. Fire.

Bobo’s wife posts pictures of their view down by the California border. It looks like hell.

People are actually trying to say Antifa is up north setting fires.  Good grief. Most people don’t even know there’s another half state on the east side of the mountains. They certainly have no interest in traipsing out there to set fires. You don’t plot to destroy places you don’t know exist. Some people up in those hills really do believe “them lefties are comin to git us.” Jeebus! Enough politics already.

I went to treat us to Subway yesterday. They had their game down. Order online, social distancing, masks, and then 2 goobers (my apologies to goobers who wouldn’t do this) are front and center at the counter leaning over the tables placed to separate the employees from the goobers. Their big uncovered window licking faces as close to the employees as possible. They’ll show us. These are the same people who whine about opening the economy. Your fearless leader sent a postcard through the US mail he says is undependable and it told us to do all the things you don’t want to do and yet you don’t want to believe its real. Now we know he also lied about how bad it was. Now the fires come. The same fires that always come. The fires don’t care what any of us think.

Pup came out to fish with Hubbin yesterday. My 27-year-old son is so far away from me these days. I know something is up with him but he acts like I’m not even there sometimes. At first, it was just him pecking away at the Lumpy van. Now I have a new van and big whoop. I feel like my heart has been plucked out. We didn’t have any kind of issue. He’s just put me on mute. Maybe it’s the new kinda-sorta girlfriend whom I haven’t met but I can’t even think that. It’s just the way he’ll roll in and be here two hours before I know he’s around and then he’ll say “well, gotta go.” Yesterday he drove up and I was sitting in the yard. He just walked into the house without even a wave. I’m invisible these days. I’m not desperate for attention at all costs but I do miss him because he’s there, a part of my heart, and it suddenly makes no sense that this cold front has moved in. It’s kind of the way my brothers treat me. It’s not even malice. It’s this idea that I’ve always been there, always will be there, nothing interesting, no need to spend a whole lot of time tending that relationship.

Being a midlife female is so disappointing these days.  If times were different the wimmin and I would run away and bitch about it over coffee. We don’t even have that right now. I’m going to a cabin next week but it has to be alone. Just like last year’s time in the RV at the lake. Alone. I’ve tried to encourage the menfolk to come up and share some of it with me but for part of that time, it’s just going to be me listening to the trains and having a reader’s vacation. Usually, I’d be over the moon about that. Right now it just feels like the trip down to the Palouse was. Neither one thing nor the other, something missing.