big city secrets: manitoulin, day 5

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

This morning I got up and planned to head to the lake unnoticed to read and to look. The daughter got up but I went down anyway. It was a little windy, appropriately, and only a little bit cold, but it was the type of cold where you can deal with it and not just tolerate it. You can enjoy it. I can enjoy it too.

I read with my back against a hard wood ledge on a dock-like concoction that overlooks the lake, legs crossed, leaning on an umbrellaless umbrella pole. I sat and read for quite a while, and then the daughter and later her grandpa came down to join. She came for cereal and for reads too. The grandpa recently filled traveller mug was filled with coffee that was brewed before he woke up this morning, and I could smell the mug's rich contents from a few steps away, through the slit in it. He was shirtless, he's always shirtless, debating a Tuesday morning swim. The temperature of the water has dropped significantly overnight, so he decided against his spur of the moment idea.

The placement of my sparce amount of bug bites is unusual. Is this a sign? Bermuda Triange? Sasquatch? Anything?

Today was the first time I was questioned about my writing outside of class in a really long time. Years. It's comfortable knowing that this journal isn't just a book, but a compilation of forever flowing ideas, sentences both hidden and uncovered. I sit very close to the happy cottage, just out the back door, in cushionless patio furniture, against the wall. I'm waiting to watch Jeopardy! on the cottage hardwood with grandma, mainly. Everything about her is so cute and acknowledgeable. Her speech impediment fascinates me. It's so captivating, I never want to let it go. I want to be around her daily, enough so I can eventually pick her brain, maybe even make her think. I want to see the VHS of her without her speech disability, although it's hardly her downfall, it being so unique and charming and therefore very able to win hearts, to compare the past to this present, here. I hear the minimal rumble of the voices indoors, wondering what my reentry will look like, be like. I don't look indoors quite yet because Vanna White is still with them. For now, I remain with nature, on this green, bony chair, on this brown, stained deck. The raindrops fall quicker to compliment this deactivated patio scene. The action is indoors, while the liney and sharp furniture is left alone to dry and to be rained on, and to dry again. Grandpa fixes the back doors, closing another, reducing those mumbles to murmurs; infantile grunting. I am looking at the Marissa Blue coloured van, the lonely bird feeders, birds flying Eastward, and my fingernails, pink. It will soon be time to enter and my individuality may fade a little shade. I feel a little awkward, and like a fake, and watched. I'd like to own a place up North to be alone, at, in, with, for. I would like to stay up all night with masses of decaffeinated (sometimes) teas and will sleep for ridiculous hours. I'l rearrange my sleeping patterns without a care, because I'll be on holidays, and alone, and/or retired, solo. A single unit, occupying my singular space on our planet.

Who knows where time goes, and where time will soon take you.

Choose!

We had dinner that enables one's ability to express one's self...

...and played dominos Probe more than once. Probe is a game very much so from the fifties. Hi Phoebe, I mean Probe:

Another gorgeous night in the 'toulin...

And now I sit. In the kitchen, with my arms resting across my sketchbook journal friend. I admire the sea blue of the walls here, and the lovely amount of rocking chairs, and they're all good to sit in. I think the two clocks I've stapled into my previous posts have begun ticking in unison now. I wonder when this happened, this merging, this turn of events. Did it happen gradually, or by accident? Did someone shut the hydraulic door too quickly? It's 1:33 now, and I am the last one up, presumably, so I think I'll soak this in for a while and then get some rest. One more full day of the 'toulin. Maybe I will get up early, go for a walk, waking no one up but myself, every gigantic piece of gravel I slip on. Would you like a cookie before bed?