25^th – cold and rainy. Not rainy yet, but it will be. We are still alive, which is good news. (And this: Constant tense-shift alert. I am too un-moured to decide past or present)

The most effective antidote for art is life. Doing life.  It’s almost impossible to write about life and live it at the same time.  I know this for certain.

I’ve been wanting to tell you what I’ve been doing the last four months, but there hasn’t been a stopping place. I think I’ve learned that I may not be an otter after-all. Or part otter, but part bulldog. Shockingly, I seem to be capable of fierce focus. Who woulda thought?  But I can’t even go into that now, because I have to talk about yesterday. No. Not even yesterday. The day before. Wednesday. See? I lost a day.  A whole flipping day. And when I tried to remember why I had to write about Wednesday, I had to dig to remember them. Which is stupid, because it was one of the weirdest days ever.

Okay, it didn’t start out weird. And it had one good part in it: Donna’s present. Came in the mail, two tiny wooly mice. But that’s getting ahead of the story.

The usual morning: fall out of bed, wrestle with the dogs, forty minutes on the treadmill, shower, remember to eat. I promised myself: no working on the publishing. I had errands to run—a stop at the bank to pick up a cashier’s check for Cam (he is buying a boat-load of professional equipment). That is the righteous part of the errands. The subsequent hunt for summer pajamas at Target and cruising Joanne’s for denim and interfacing were supposed to be a kind of reward: I had just finished up a huge manuscript project for print. Deadline met. Hours of trouble shooting finally finished.

G, who had sent me sternly away from my desk, was supposed to be busy in the studio.

So, I got into my trusty, grown-up Toyota and headed north. On the way out there, I got the urge to hit DI (Goodwill), just for a moment, to troll for cast-off cashmere sweaters (guilt: an extra self-indulgence). They had plenty of sweaters (tis the season to toss wool sweaters), but only one cashmere—which was mud brown, but already felted, which is probably why someone had “donated” it.

See? I’m writing horribly.

So I get into the car, bustling off to do what I was supposed to be doing, when I get this frantic phone call from one of my fellow local horse-women, one who pastures on the other side of the river.  “It’s Wendy,” she panted. “My friend just drove by your pasture and there was this guy down there, standing at the fence, screaming at your horses and picking up those rocks on the shoulder. She said it looked like he was throwing them at the horses.  She said he looked like he was on meth or something.”

So instead of going north, I hightail it back south, driving like the wind through all the little backstreets. I called G, caught him in mid-first-bite of lunch.  He dropped everything and jumped in his truck to check it out. It’s amazing how long a short distance can be when you’re freaking out.

Just about the time I turn onto Center, G calls me.  “I can’t see anybody,” he says. I’m still driving west, covering ground fast. Getting a speeding ticket is not a part of this story; it should have been. I pass a guy who is walking east, but he’s in a button down shirt, carrying a briefcase.  I do not peg him for a screaming rock-thrower.

G says he’ll drive around the corner, heading south, and check out the airport road, and I can see him driving away from me as I come even with the pasture.

The horses don’t seem to be at all alarmed as I drive by. They’re so focused on the grass, they don’t even look up.  When they are not eating, they can hear my car from a mile away, and all be standing there impatiently, their hooves on their hips, by the time I pull up in the driveway.  So I just kept driving down Center, on the look-out for a scary person.

And I find him.  Half a block down, there’s this guy who looks like a biker (as in Harley Davidson) in shorts, red bandana on his head, longish gray beard (biker long, not G long).  He is standing on the rural shoulder of the opposite side of the road, just in front of a little enclosure where two tiny dear are kept. He seems to be yelling at the deer. And he is picking up rocks. But I don’t see him throwing them. He seems to be lining them up on the shoulder, two neat little rows of white rocks.  But he also seems to be shaking his fist at the deer,

I go the equivalent of a block further (this is a long farm road), turn around and drive back past him.  And I open my window slightly, sort of hoping to hear what he’s yelling. He bends down to pick up more rocks and raises his hand high above his head, but oddly doesn’t seem actually to be throwing. He turns as I drive by, looks at me and points at me, and I catch the words, “And somebody is . . ..” Like he’s on a Bluetooth or something.

I called G at that point, as he came back around the corner, headed for our pasture.  I turned around and we talked through rolled down windows. While we’re talking, I see this jogger – who is actually walking – who is passing the crazy guy who is also now walking – going further west down the road. As the jogger gets closer to the guy, the guy puts down the plastic bag he’s carrying and awkwardly strips off his shirt. Now he is really a biker in shorts. And he has walked out into the middle of the road, as though to meet the jogger—who scoots by him and starts jogging again.  The shirtless yeller is now walking down the middle of the road.

G went home to lunch. I called the police.  I sat there for a few minutes looking over the still oblivious horses, concluding that they couldn’t really have been horribly threatened.  Then I decide to drive past the man again (who is farther down the road and back on my side of the street). It’s just, there’s something extremely strange going on.

This time, when I pass him (I’m going west toward the lake), he’s standing in front of a broken-down ancient barn enclosure where the neighbors down there are keeping one horse—at that moment, one very nervous, bothered horse. Because the guy is yelling at him and pointing. And picking up rocks.  And raising his arm way above his head – and throwing the rocks? I still can’t tell.  I go down a ways further, wondering where the police are, and pull over on the shoulder.  A car coming the other way also pulls over. It’s Suzanne, Wendy’s friend who had seen the whole thing, and she gets out of her car to come talk to me.  She’d actually been on the freeway when Wendy called her back and told her that I wasn’t home and couldn’t get down there to save the horses.  Suzanne had gotten off the freeway to come back and save them herself.

So we watched the guy cross the road on foot again, and there he was doing the same odd thing on the other side of the street, yelling at the horses in the field on that side.  Finally, a very means-business park ranger woman drove out of the Lake State Park, came up the road and stopped to ask us if we’d seen a crazy guy.

“Right there,” we both said. And there he was flinging his arms around and pointing and yelling and picking up rocks.  “I’ll talk to him,” she said, and drove towards the guy.  “I wonder if she has a weapon?” Suzanne wondered.  But he didn’t yell at the ranger.  And then two patrol cars came roaring down the road from town.

And then nothing happened.  They had to guy sit down. We stayed where we were. They stayed where they were. And that’s the end of this part.  We never found out what happened. But Suzanne and I enjoyed reconnecting. So that was worth it. (Makes quizzical face.)

So here we are again in the middle of a forever long tale, and I’m not half finished. So I’lll cut the rest short. The rest of it wasn’t quite as colorful, anyway.

So I drive all the way back north to finish the errands. Now they don’t feel like a reward.

They feel like work.

I go to the bank. Nice chit-chat there.  Then I go to Joanne’s. By this time, I’m kind of in a stupor. I consciously slow down and prowl the isles, touching the fabrics and trying to remind myself that I hardly sew anymore.

Then I go to Target, where there are nearly no cute jimmies at all.  Either you buy stuff with monkeys all over them, or shirts with v necks so deep, you have to wonder why they bother to add any fabric to them at all. I pick a few things. I love very large, sloppy, friendly pjs.

By this time, I’m tired. I chat with the cashier. She takes my plastic. I start for the car. But cannot find my keys. May I stop here and tell you that Target had, in the mere months since my last visit, entirely re-arranged the store? Nothing was where it used to be. There was new wall dividing front from back. I was totally disoriented. And where the devil would I have left my keys? I sat down on a bench, emptied out my purse twice (I did NOT manage to lose the cashier’s check, which is, considering the rest of the day, a miracle). Searched my pockets. Went out to the car to see if I’d maybe dropped them on the seat and locked myself out. But no.  Not that.

Headed back into the store. And noticed that my sight had gone just a little weird. Which meant, I was about to have a migraine. The second in a month. But only the third since I’d had my organs removed, like ten years ago. The cashier didn’t have my keys. I hit customer service last of all. By this time, I was pulling myself across the floor like some poor waterless soul trying to make it through Death Valley. “No,” said the girl behind the first register. “Yes,” said the girl behind the second. And she got them for me.  And they were mine.

By that time, I had that squiggly shiny worm thing that some of us in the migraine club get. It doesn’t blind you, just cuts this nasty, brilliant, hot shape in the middle of your vision.  And I had to drive home.  Which I could. But not cheerfully.

Got home. G fed the horses for me, but he also announced that he was leaving on his trip (an uncle’s funeral in California) a day early. Actually, as soon as he could throw his stuff into the car. Which was fine. Just more—strange.

I sat down.  G went up to pack. The dogs went wild. Insane. At the front door. This is our equivalent of a door bell.  Only, the wooden front door had been left open, so the dogs had pushed the storm door open and were now threatening someone’s life, out there on the front porch.

I got up.  Our poor neighbors, mother and son, were standing in the middle of a whirling mass of mini-aussie. I saved them.  But they didn’t look any happier saved.

“I’m so sorry,” Sam said.

And I was confused. He was sorry my dogs were rude?

“We have insurance,” Michelle said.

Which cleared things up nicely. That was supposed to be sarcasm.

“He was backing across the street after we washed the car.  He has his permit—“

Now, I have to stop here and mention that G was intending to take my trusty Toyota with him to this funeral.  And I was to be left with the ratty little truck (and when I say ratty, this is the vehicle G takes fishing, the one, he says, that “smells like freedom”—the one that had the radio jerked out of it one midnight a few summers ago—the one with a bench seat that is stuck and cannot be moved up so that I can keep my behind on the seat and my feet on the peddles at the same time) and the humongous Suburban that is so brawny, it can pull four large horses and a five thousand pound horse trailer up a mountain. The one that filling with gas costs a year’s income (in many parts of the world). And that would cost us a year’s income to replace.

“Which car?” I croak.

“The red one,” they say, hanging their heads and wringing their hands.

I am, at this point, less concerned with replacing our horse-hauling vehicle than I am with having to drive the Terrible Truck for a week.

“We’ll show you,” they say.  So G and I follow them out on the road. I love my neighbors. I adore Sam.  I am trying not to whine audibly as we follow them.  We come up on the street side. “Where?” we ask.

“There,” they say, pointing.

But we see nothing.

“Where?” we ask again, now standing right there by the driver’s seat door, the one I expected to be concave. It is not.

“There,” Michelle says, pointing again.

We lean over. Way over.  Like, we have to almost get on our knees.  And there, on the underside of the car, in a three inch panel between the door and the fender, is a ball-hitch sized dent.

This is the place where I begin to expound on the tender mercies.  Because Sam has dented our car in a place that has no function, that interferes with nothing and that cannot be seen by anybody who is not lying down in the road. Not. Worth. Fixing.

Now I am trying not to giggle audibly.  It would be hysterical giggling, anyway.  The kind people slap you for.

Then G threw his stuff in the car (it was actually a long process. We said good-bye no less than five times – only to find that he had the wrong key, or that he’d forgotten something else – ) and drove away to visit with his brother and cousins.

And I sat down, only to be called by one child or another, and my father, as though they had all taken numbers and were determined to keep me from being lonely.

And that was my day.  And that was why I did not write a blog about what I’ve been doing (which will not be half as exciting).  And that is why I think it’s probably bed-time now, even though it’s Friday night, not quite dark and the cat is away and this mouse doesn’t have the energy to party in his absence.

Besides, even if G isn’t here, I’d still feel guilty about eating an entire triple berry pie by myself, even if it was without ice cream.

And that’s the end. (I am not editing this. And I am too tired to add pictures. Which I was planning to do. Until now.)