I looked out this morning and saw that the lone remaining Stargazer lily is blooming. A few years back Durwood and I bought a raft of them on clearance at a grocery store parking lot greenhouse. I don't know why they've not survived but this is the last one. It's beautiful and it smells like heaven.
The tomatoes are ripening! Every day there's more red-orange out there for me to moon over and take pictures of. Pretty soon those other ones will start changing color too.
There are a bunch of tiny cucumbers on the vines. This one posed on a stake so you can see it. It's about an inch and a quarter long. Teeny tiny.
I went over to ALDI this afternoon to pick up a few things, especially a package of split chicken breasts for only 99 cents a pound. I've been wanting to grill some meat and that sounded just right. The package I got was just under five pounds so I've got a nice container of cooked and boned chicken just ready for meals this week. I didn't take it's picture; you know what grilled chicken looks like.
25 July--Barbara Malcolm, Better Than Mom's.
Fay was a single woman, again. She had run through, or worn out, a couple of husbands and a significant other or two in her skid toward her fortieth birthday. Her hair had started out white blond, aged to dishwater in junior high, and never been a natural color since. These days it was red, Knock ‘Em Dead Red according to the box. She favored the old-style party curls that were popular with waitresses in the seventies, and Fay considered herself a waitress rather than a server, damn political correctness.
She had gotten the job at Better Than Mom’s over a year ago when her eighty-seven Honda Civic decided to throw a tie-rod on the interstate that formed the northern border of the city. She had ridden in with the tow truck driver, taken a room at the Super Snooze Motel right next door to Better Than Mom’s, and ate her first meal in Stinson there. A visit to the mechanic down the block had convinced her that the great vast undefined middle of the country was where she was meant to stop—at least for the time being.
She had left her last husband as he ran down the back steps of their doublewide in semi-rural New York as she pulled away with all her worldly goods and the proceeds of the sale of his prized custom made pool cue to some sucker on eBay. She figured that over the year and seven weeks of their marriage he had spent a lot more time fondling that damned cherry wood stick than he did her. She considered it “the other woman” in her marriage and once she had decided to cut her losses and move on to the left coast, she had no qualms about taking fetching photos of the offending stick, posting them on the online auction site with an enticing description mentioning the famous maker and the fact that it had been instrumental in the winning of more than one state tournament. She put a reasonable reserve in it, and watched the bids climb. The only way she got away with it was her husband was only interested in Internet porn and sites that analyzed the strategy of pro pool players he might meet across a table. She kept her fingers crossed that none of his pool playing buddies would see it on the site and give her away. No one did.
The bidding topped out at six hundred eighty-seven dollars so she gleefully packaged it up and sent it off to the happy winner with a note inside telling him how she hoped he would win a lot with the cue. The fact that the stick went to a buyer in North Carolina was a bonus. Players from that area of the country regularly came to New York for tournaments or workshops so there was every possibility that her soon to be ex-husband would face his own cue one day.
Two days after her ignominious entrance into town she counted her remaining money, knew there was no way short of prostitution she would have the money to ransom her car in the near future, and resigned herself to spending some time in Stinson, Wisconsin. She left the Super Snooze and stood on the sidewalk surveying her options. To her right stretched a string of tire shops, bedraggled strip malls, and mechanic’s garages that catered to people who had taken the Stinson exit by accident or ignorance. The neon glimmer of a couple of no-tell motels across the street did not attract her interest. She was too old and too selfish to even consider earning her living on her back and too proud to embark on a new and exciting career as a chambermaid in such places. To her left was the Better Than Mom’s diner where she had eaten at least one meal a day, a used car lot that offered vehicles that looked like they had barely made it to the patch of asphalt on which they stood, a cluster of what were obviously low-rent welfare class apartment buildings, one end of the center one of the group scorched from what must have been a grease fire. Maybe she could get a job in the diner and an apartment without even leaving the sidewalk. She patted her hair to make certain it was in place, even though she always used enough hair spray that any renegade hairs that managed to escape would have cut a less careful hand.
Today's toss was a couple drink cups, you know, with lids and a bottle shaped like a fish. I told you that I have (had) a lot of fish stuff and it's all going away.
The humidity came back today making me extra glad that I mowed the lawn earlier this week when it was nicer out there.
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