Time For Some Random

Indeed.  My thoughts have been all over the place lately. My brain is having a touch of the spring fever, flitting around like the finest grains of pollen, infesting the airways of the masses.

My nemesis?  Hackberry.  Look, there's a cough RIGHT in the name of the darn tree!  And I do hack quite a bit when hackberry is in bloom.  Sometimes I even lose my voice from hacking, to my husband's delight. 

We are supposed to be getting rain today, and that would be great news, since it would not only wash all of the pollen out of the air, it would clear out most of the smoke from the farm fires in Mexico.  Those guys feel that it is most cost efficient to burn their fields instead of plowing the chaff under.  I can understand their logic, as most Mexican farmers do not own the expensive equipment that American farmers spend tons of cash on.  However, all that burning creates a smoke cloud that travels north every year and makes the outdoors exceptionally hazy.  The only time the air appears hazier is when the dust from the Sahara travels across the freakin' Atlantic and shows up here.  Think about that a moment.  Sand from another continent ends up in America all by itself, with no help from the usual suspects like shipping containers and errant tourists.  They can even track it on satellite! That's fascinating, at least to a nerd like myself.

I've been having feelings of anxiety lately.  No reason, at least not any that I can figure out.  I love my job, I'm not in trouble, my husband and son continue to be adorable, I'm in the best health I've ever been. So why do I suddenly find myself thinking that something is wrong?  And of course, once you start thinking such a thing, you can't stop for awhile.  It's a loop that plays the same lines over and over inside your head.  It's annoying.  Since there does not appear to be an actual legitimate cause, my brain is already going down a list of things that it might be, such as my thyroid or menopause and what have you. Because that is SO helpful!

My husband and I have been having an argument discussion about what constitutes yelling. I tend to raise my voice when I want to be heard.  It's a habit born of years of people overlooking me, brushing me off, and disregarding my perspective.  If I didn't speak loudly, I wouldn't have been noticed.  I am not nearly as bad as I used to be, of course, but since I do the least amount of talking in the house, occasionally I feel that have to speak up a bit louder than the others.  And raising my voice while speaking firmly is one of two signals to my child that I mean business. I do not actually yell, though.  I just get chastised for yelling often. My husband, on the other hand, speaks several decibels above normal. That is his normal speaking voice, and since I know that, I rarely say a word about it, and neither does Zane.  It bothers me that I am not afforded the same courtesy, and I am also concerned that we will all need hearing aids before long. 

Anyway, thanks for visiting and listening to my little rants about nothing.  Have a great day and visit Stacy over at her place.   She always has something interesting going on!

WOE: Sand

Write On Edge prompt:  Write 450 words about sand.  Yep.  Sand. Since I wrote it, I thought that I should post it. This is fiction, of course.

"STOP RIGHT THERE!"  My mom met us, broom in hand, before the screen door slammed.  The two of us dutifully froze.

"Where have you two been?"  Sweat beaded on her upper lip, her hair disheveled, and she seemed out of breath.  I wondered if she had run from the kitchen when she heard us stomping up the front porch steps.

"We went to the dunes!" My brother proudly exclaimed.  John held up his blue bucket, grains of sand slipping through the crack on the side. 

"Lordy! Effie, you are ten years old!"  she exclaimed.  "You're supposed to keep your brother out of mischief, not help him with it!"

There was no time to roll my eyes before my mother was shoving us back out the door, grumbling about sand on her clean floors.  We were told that she would bring us towels so we could remove all of our sandy clothing.  The screen door slammed as our mother rushed back inside, toward the kitchen.  I thought that I heard a low voice, male, coming from the kitchen.

"Did Dad come back from work early?" I asked my mother when she came out with the towels. 

"What? No, he won't be back until tomorrow," my mother was startled. "You know that, Effie."

"I thought that I heard him in the kitchen, that's all,"  I bent over to take off my other sock, watching as grains of sand spilled on the porch.

"You imagined it, is all," she grabbed my brother's socks and turned them inside out. More sand dribbled out, to add to the pile already accumulating.

John and I stripped out of our clothes, tired after our day in the sun.  Sand seemed to pour from every pore, more sand than I remembered ever seeing before.  It was between our toes, behind our knees, under our arms, and behind our ears.  When we were done, a small dune of sand had formed; the three of us stared at it.  My mother  tsked at us, ordering us upstairs for a bath.  We were not to come down until we were spotless.

The two of us clutched our towels and raced up the stairs as she held the screen door for us; I heard it slam before we got to the bathroom.   John got the bath water running.   I left the room to go get us some clothing to put on, and that is when I heard voices again.  My mother's voice, familiar as breathing, and the lower register of a man.  The screen door slammed as I stood in the hallway.  Then I shook my head.  My mother was right; I was imagining things. 

Except, when I went back out to the porch to collect my shoes, I found a single, man-sized shoe print in the middle of the pile of sand we children had created.

Now With More Sand!

The beach and I have generally had a love-hate relationship.

I love walking along the water line early in the morning.

I hate stepping on jellyfish and some sort of unidentifiable icky thing that gives me the dry heaves.

I love building sand castles.

I hate sand getting into everything I own, even stuff that I did not actually bring to the beach. (Physicists should be studying THAT phenomenon.)

I love listening to the waves roll in, and sometimes standing in the surf.

I hate not being able to see what is in those waves. Thank you, Stephen Spielberg!

After several attempts to work on our relationship, the beach and I parted ways amicably. I didn't even request joint custody of the sand.

We didn't travel when Zane was younger because we weren't sure how he would do sitting for lengthy periods in his car seat, or how he would deal with sleeping in a strange bed, or what he would eat if there were no chicken nuggets or waffles to be found. We decided this summer that it was time to try a "mini" vacation of a couple of days to see how the boy did. Our first little trip, to Grapevine, Texas(did not actually see any grapevines, but still a very nice town), was a rousing success. This encouraged my husband to suggest a second short trip, this time to Corpus Christi.

"That sounds great," I said, but I was thinking about the sand.

"Why is your eye twitching like that?" Larry asked me.

Once I got over the idea of all the sand, I got a little excited about our trip. It would be my son's very first trip to the beach! I was also very excited that it was my husband who suggested that we go, because he doesn't really like to be outside of his comfort zone.

We explained to Zane that we were going to the beach a few days early, to get him used to the idea. This was a mistake, since three-year-olds have not adapted to the concept of time, and most of them do not understand words like "tomorrow", "next week", or even "five minutes". It's funny how we as adults take those words for granted. But Zane was very excited about the trip, and he talked about the beach every day like we were going that day.

Then it was time to pack. I picked out some toys for Zane to take with him.

"No," my boy told me.

"No?"

"No." Zane repeated. "Shark will eat them."

"Shark?" I shrugged. "Okay."

We drove to Corpus Christi, which is the closest beach from where we live. The first day we were there, we went to the Texas State Aquarium(we had to see Dory and Nemo), the USS Lexington, and then we went to a beach that was actually in Corpus Christi. Zane loved it. He liked the waves and how the water seemed to chase him where ever he went.

Larry had had the idea that he and Zane could build sandcastles together; Zane liked the idea, but wasn't all that into actual construction.



No, my child was all about the waves and the water. We got tired of yelling at him not to go to far out, so I sat beside him. All around us, the sand was pulled inexorably into the ocean. This too was wondrous for Zane. We stayed at the beach in Corpus until the sun was almost out of the sky.




When we got back to the car, the sand had followed us. We attempted to dust off as much as we could, but it was a futile effort. We drove back to the hotel, and after showering and rinsing all of our clothes, we figured that we had removed at least a gallon of sand from the beach. That did not include the amount of sand that we left in the car.

And it was only our first day!

RemembeRED: Benediction

Note: This week, we want you to write about sand. Yes...sand.

It doesn't have to be summer-related, but the impending summer and my proximity to Lake Michigan and it's glorious beaches are what inspired me to tell you to write about sand.

So.

SAND.

GO.

Oh, and come back Tuesday, May 10 and link up.

SAND.


It was my first overnight trip without my parents. I was almost eighteen, and three of my friends and I had packed up the car and driven to Ocean City. We dropped off our stuff at our cramped hotel room, changed into swimsuits, and hit the sand for four days of summer fun. The sun was high in the sky at that point; the group of us never could manage to leave for anywhere on time. But it didn't matter, because we were at the beach! On our own!!!! Squeeeeeee!!!!! I remember that we had a wonderful time. We sunned, we walked the boardwalk, we flirted with cute boys, and were just girls for the last moments before we all went off to college.

Yet I have never been a person who enjoys moving among the crowds of people and music and noise that is the summertime at the beach. My senses quickly became overwhelmed trying to keep up. So I woke up early on the second day, quietly dressed in some shorts and a t-shirt, left a note for my friends, and walked the two blocks to the beach while it was still dark.

At that time of the day, there wasn't yet another soul out here: it was just me, the sand, and the implacable vastness of the ocean meeting the stars...it felt sacred.

As I first stepped onto the beach that morning, the sand felt as cool as water as my feet melded into it. The sand was fluid, sliding over my feet and slippery between my toes. I walked toward the ocean, just to the edge of where the waves carried the water up onto the beach. I took one step more, hesitant, and the tide of water rushed over the top of my feet, carrying the sand that I was standing on away from me. It was as though I was sinking into the ground, my feet yearning to be rooted here, a tree to bear witness to my insignificance. I felt uplifted by the moment; uplifted, and sanctified. I watched the sun rise up above the water, and then I walked back to the hotel room, marveling at what I had seen.

My friends were still sleeping when I crept back into the room. I locked the door and lay down on a bed. As I drifted off, I tried to hold onto the emotions, that blessing, that I had experienced out on that beach, but they flowed away from me like the cool sand had slipped between my toes.