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It’s Tuesday, where are you?
I’m…
1. On The Road…..I don’t know where exactly,it’s just the road…forever the dark road,gray,desolate,barren,ashen, nothing.
2. Also on another road, the Healing one….with Neal Peart on his motorcycle. I’m still in Canada, nearly to Alaska
3. In Norway, listening to a Grandma tell her orphaned Grandson stories about Witches
My reading is influencing my dreams. I had post-apocolyptic dreams with baby-eating cannibals all night long. Thank you, Cormac McCarthy.
[title from "Ghost Rider" by Rush]
The tree outside the bedroom window is half-dead. It’s non-dead part is very proud of itself for fighting the good fight and growing on and has become rather cocky in it’s “I’m a Survivor!” status. It’s become bold enough to cross property lines and has butted it’s branches right up to the metal siding of the neighboring building.
At night,Jupiter lays in bed listening to the tree, it’s branches playing a sick violin concerto against the rusted metal. It grates on her nerves. She tosses and turns on a mattress given to her by the neighbors, for free. “Free…can’t beat that price with a stick”, her Grandpa would have said. Normally,Jupiter would agree and cherish all free things given to her. She’s not too proud to take charity and proud to rescue things from the dump. In the case of the mattress,though…..there was a reason it was free. When laying in bed, she can feel the curved contour of every single metal spring pressing against her body. She’s become accustomed to sleeping on her side, spending a few minutes every might to adjust her body into the spaces between the coils. When she shifts in her sleep, the coils pinch and press,waking her.
Violinist tree,springy bed.Jupiter does not sleep well. She dreams of being serenaded from the ground below by Venetian Snares . She thinks to herself,”Ok, so it’s not Lloyd Dobler with his boombox but I’ll take it.” In the dream, she opens the window and climbs out on to the porch roof below the bedroom window. She peers over the edge of the roof and instead of anything musical happening, the gnarly water witchy creature thingy from Legend is there in it’s place, raking it’s nails over the metal trashcan lids. She runs back to the bedroom window to escape but inside, there are open bear traps, their huge metal jaws waiting to latch onto her the second she tries to reenter her bedroom.
In daylight hours, Jupiter sits in the backyard ,reading mindless drivel while the children play. The tree mutters it’s half-ass apologies and cackles at it’s mischief. Jupiter glances up from her book periodically to glare and curse at the tree with it’s rust-kissed blathering. Jupiter loves trees and has been called a tree-hugger a time or two in her life. She loves people and humanity too but she still meets folks who make her wonder what their purpose is here on the Earth. She reasons it’s quite possible to feel that way about a tree too.
Like the warrior Queen Boudicca planning strategic moves against Roman invasion, Jupiter draws up her battle plan. She maps out the best possible route to reach the insidious limb. She gathers her weapon, a small handsaw.
The tree is absent of low branches so Jupiter improvises ,using the children’s Little Tikes climber to hoist herself up into the higher branches of the tree. Climbing with the saw is awkward but at last ,she reaches her destination .From the point she chooses to hack limbs, she’s still on her own property,even if the branch has breeched those lines and below, there is nothing that can be hurt by falling tree parts. She straddles the branch below the offending limb. It’s one of only a few branches with leaves, loving the sun. In self-defense they dance and sway to allow sun to filter through into Jupiter’s eyes, making her work of severing the limb harder than it should be. The teeth of the saw grabs into the bark. The sun in her eyes make her lose focus.She’s normally very competent with a saw but carpal tunnel numbs her hand and before she knows it, the saw has slipped out of her hand . The handle of the saw bounces on her knee on the way down to the ground,leaving a dull throb.Heart-pounding, Jupiter thanks Mother Nature for the slap in the face and that she was dealt the message without the saw blades pointing downward into the flesh of her leg..
The tree wins. Jupiter accepts defeat. Tomorrow she’ll rearrange the bedroom so she’s not so near the window anymore or just fall asleep to her own music to drown out the screeching violin.
