The point was -- now that the roads were clear enough, QUITE clear, in fact -- I could catch the laundry up in Cut Bank. The summer bedding has been in a heap in the middle of my front room for a week or more. In fact, so much ordinary clothing had filled up the baskets that I really only did half the wash. It took two of the double-machines and four singles. A lady who arrived just as I loaded the machines protested, "You took the whole aisle!" I didn't but the other machines on that aisle were out of order. Even so, the 90-year-old proprietor who runs the desk had to call his wife in from the country to make two machines run properly and one never did the last spin, so the contents are out in the pickup waiting for morning when I'll put them on the line sopping wet and let them dry all day.
The owner, who was a military guard at Nuremberg. is a politics buff, so we always have a good time talking. I had a lot of science news to tell as well. Why the weather is so unexpected (the circumpolar air stream is breaking down and developing loops) and which one of the submerged lands I talked about in earlier posts was the fabled Atlantis. My friend always wants to feed me and offered cookies. I finally accepted a graham cracker.
After the laundry I went to the grocery store, which has had a face lift that confuses me, and barely managed to resist buying a white paleonopolis (?) orchid for $25 because I always neglect things to death except geraniums and spider plants. A bag of onions, a package of TP, 2 small pieces of meat, 4 cheap cans of soup, some buns, and a new cat toy cost over sixty dollars.
The cat toy is a miniature hedgehog, very realistic and hairy. They love it. The Bug, their former toy, was getting pretty worn. Sometimes it's a mouse or bird and ends up in the cat food dish and sometimes it's a little kitten and one of them takes it to bed. There's a realistic flannel mouse who sometimes shows up.
Thread, sister of the ill-fated Thimble, who brought
the Bug with her for her nap.
The gray butt she's up against is her mother, Blue Bunny.
Blue Bunny is a kind of ice cream, but I don't eat that kind.
On the way back I parked at the overlook meant to indicate the camping spot where Lewis and three others camped overnight with a group of Blackfeet boys herding horses, woke in the morning to realize the boys were stealing their guns, and killed two of them. We know the names and families of the victims. Lewis put a medallion necklace on one dead person. We don't know why. I ate my lunch in the pickup there and pondered the event. (I probably should not tell you lunch was a small container of coffee flavor Haagen-Daas ice cream.)
When I got home I took a nap with the cats and their new hedgehog. There were no dreams. At least I didn't have any.
The point is that the day after a soul-search that was fairly intense and that some people would resist as being past and best forgotten, can be recovered from with trivia. The state of this house is disastrous, though I shouldn't use that word when there are real disasters still unassimilated. But that's the way a writer rolls.
Note the little things, recognize the big things, let oneself slowly realize that a week of good weather is beginning, so I can clean the gutters before the next snow. Unless I forget.
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