100 words - Day 10 of 50: Fat clothes

I have three big bags full of clothes. I’m donating them to the local hospice thrift store; I need the closet space. Some of the clothes are pretty old. Some are almost new. They’re my “fat clothes.”

They’re all up to four sizes too big for me now. Today I wear the size I wore about 20 years ago.

This is a big step for me. I’ve never banished my “fat clothes” before; I was afraid I’d need them again. But I know I won’t. I’ve learned.

Those stuffed bags represent decades of blumphy discomfort. They no longer weigh me down.

100 words - Day 9 of 50: Young people today

Oh, he looked a sight!

Young people today had no sense of decorum, Gertrude thought as she surveyed the young man standing in her kitchen. He held a steaming bowl of her mutton stew, wolfing it with a soup-spoon as if he hadn’t had a bite to eat all day. He wouldn’t sit down proper at the table – said he had no time, he was due at the dance in just 15 minutes – but she couldn’t see why that meant he had to stand to eat, like he was a young horse. All that was missing was the feed-bag.

100 words - Day 8 of 50: Dusk walk

Dusk gathers, the shadows beneath the great trees deepening. The earth is dry and spongy from the fir and pine needles slowly, slowly dissolving into the soil but if he steps just so, even in his thick-soled hiking shoes, he makes no sound. The air is sharp and chilly; a light breeze lifts his dark hair and caresses his ears.

A jay – a Steller’s, with its aquamarine and royal blue body and wings, its sooty-black, tufted head and feet – scolds him. Shhh, bird, you’ll alert them to my position. He steps deeper into the trees, making himself a shadow, invisible.

100 Words – Day 7 of 50: Why peppermint tea?

Summertime and peppermint tea. They go hand-in-hand, like winter and gloves or autumn and orange leaves. Spring and changeable weather. You get my drift.
My reasons for loving peppermint tea? Three:
1. Gloriously refreshing on hot days, made strong and mixed with lots of ice.
2. Blessedly therapeutic boiled, steeped, set on a kitchen table and inhaled while tenting a towel over your head. Clears blocked sinuses in minutes.
3. A tea brewed from peppermint leaves is so whimsical and magic, it’s hard to believe it exists. It’s a faerie drink.

100 words - Day 6 of 50: Girl in black

Later, on the train, Tom took his laptop out of his briefcase and, sitting with it on his knees, started typing.

“I met the most intriguing young woman today,” he wrote in the journal space under the day’s date. “Her name is Emma. She works in a book shop in the Canal Road. She was wearing black from head to toe, a black clip in her hair, jet chips in her ears, a slim black dress and black Mary Jane-type shoes. Only her skin, rose-tinged porcelain, and her lips, pink as dawn, provided contrast.

“I think she is quite beautiful.”

100 words – Day 5 of 50: Little white lies

It had been a fishing trip, a fact-finding mission. Tom had known the man for years, and he was often a very good source of information, moving as he did through the shadowy world of arms buyers and sellers. A devout Muslim, he had no more moral problem with his work than did the Christians from whom he often bought his inventory. What Mohammed did was perfectly legal; in fact, he’d purchased this particular high-powered automatic rifle from the Americans.

He felt a little bad about his white lie to Emma, but he couldn’t have told her all that, anyway.

100 words – Day 4 of 50: Sunday bells

Church bells sounded through the heavy sea-fog, flat and fey, everywhere but nowhere in the small German city on the sea. The bells competed with lonely foghorns. Seagulls mewed. In summer, when the sun bathed the cobbled streets and stone buildings in clean yellow light, the church bells sounded bright and reverent, a soundtrack for red geranium petals drifting to the sidewalks. But when the wind blew topsy-turvy the Sunday bells wavered and rippled, and in heavy rain the peals sounded underwater, as if they were calling Neptune and his mer-people to worship.

There are no church bells here.

100 words – Day 2 of 50: Summer gray

It was the strangest summer she’d ever spent in sweltering-hot Northern California. Nearly every day in June was gunship gray and cool, but there was no rain. The daytime house looked winterish, flat and shadowy inside. Flowers bloomed without benefit of sunshine. Tomato plants grew. Haunting wind-chimes dingled in the breeze. Twice, thunder ba-boomed. Once, hail rattatatatted for thirty seconds.

Years ago, her elderly friend Magrit in Germany complained the weather there had changed drastically since she was a girl. She blamed it on jet contrails.

Oh cool, quirky un-California June. Global warming? Or just the bitter surprise of age?

100 words – Day 1 of 50: Inspiration

OK. I note that Blue Girl is doing the 100-word, 50-day challenge again. As you may have noticed, I have not written anything for quite a long time. Why? My muse has deserted me. For the last couple of months I’ve been unable to think of anything I care enough to write about. Or maybe I haven’t been able to think of anything to write about that I want to share.

Anyway, I think I’m back. I’m going to follow in the inspirational BG’s footsteps and make myself write 100 words every day for 50 days.

40/50 - Up for the next round ...

I’m reeling.

Yesterday I had one of those ooky female medical exams, part of my first yearly physical with the VA. During the breast exam, the doc found some “density” along the outer side of my left breast. She asked if I had a mammogram scheduled. I do, in mid-May.

“No,” she said, “it has to be sooner. I’ll fix that.”

The “density” in my breast could be nothing, she said, so I shouldn’t worry. While I was digesting that, she looked at my blood test results and informed me that I’m diabetic.

I believe that’s called a “one-two” punch.

39/50 - It's raining, it's pouring ...

One of the most beautiful sounds in the world is the sound of rain outside an open window, pattering on new spring leaves, tippling the old sidewalk, filling the air with a gentle shush and the most sensual, fecund scent. As usual, I’m amused: the weather widget on my desktop has been red-flagging this quiet rain I’m listening to in the minutes before dawn for days now, warning of severe weather. How odd that in the 21^st Century, a little rainstorm equals “hair on fire.” Ah, the rabble of robins in the laurels wake up. And yes, there’s a wren.

38/50 – Worst. President. Evah.

Sixty-nine percent of Americans think that George W. Bush is doing a crappy job as President. The other 28 percent – that’s 28 out of 100 Americans – thinks he’s doing just fine.

They are obviously dunderheads.

The truth is, Bush let us down. Instead of providing strong, capable leadership with honesty and integrity, he lied to us, he cheated us, he stole money from our pockets, he sent our friends and family members to fight and die in an unnecessary war and he laid the whole, stinking debt for it all on future generations of Americans.

Can we arrest him now?

37/50 - Does heaven have a taste? Mine does.

It’s close to noon. I haven’t eaten. I’m the sort of neglegent person who rarely eats breakfast. It’s not that I don’t like it, it’s just that it takes three or four hours after I wake up for my stomach to wake up, too. I’m just not hungry. If there aren’t evil donuts or pastries laying around to tempt me, I don’t eat.

Now I’m hungry. I make my favorite sandwich: Dense, cake-y whole grain bread, light mayo, slices of ripe red tomato with a generous shake of sea salt, and two thin slices of provolone. Simple. Tastes like heaven.

36/50 - Silence of the flimmers

Got behind on my 100-words-a-day-for-50-days self-challenge. It’s not that I can’t think of anything to write – indeed, I’ve been writing a lot. More than 100 words, too, so there.

Frankly, my 100-word posts, no matter what the subject matter, don’t seem to be getting much of a rise out of all youse guys out there. My guess? You don’t like them. True, Blue Wren doesn’t draw many readers. But 30-60 people a day do stumble in, most of them by mistake while searching for “blue flim”. Does anyone say anything? Nope. Days pass in Internet silence. And I lose interest.

35/50 - Compelled to drift

I’m drifting, floating, swirling slowly down into that strange, compelling state that immediately precedes sleep. It’s only a few minutes after 10 p.m., but my eyelids are almost impossibly heavy. I’m sitting up in my green corduroy office chair, and each time I let go and drift away into that fey country of disembodied voices and sudden images, my head tips off my neck and I flail awake, afraid I’m falling.

I’ll stop fighting it now. I’ve been up since dawn. My body is compelling me to be quiet, curl up snug, close my eyes and fall asleep. Nighters …

33/50 - Won't hurt a bit

VA medical center today, first appointment. Doc’s an old lady hippy, quick and lithe with long gray hair and a sweet smile.

The New Rules, good for arthritis hands and hot flashes: No more coffee. No sugar. Take fish oil and grapeseed extract, magnesium and whole foods.

Give up coffee? I swallow hard.

“It will help.”

Hands x-rayed. The reservist who jabbed me with pneumonia vaccine joked about the “shot lines” in basic training. “Remember that?” he asked gleefully.

Oh, did I. Imagine: A gauntlet of hypodermics, each one for your two arms. Left, right, left, right.

I’m still smiling.

 

32/50 - Going back to bed

Wake up thoughts this morning:

Where is Knut Gingrich? (shudders)

We all know what a slimeball Joe Lieberman is. Imagine: He could have been elected as VP with Gore. What in the world made Al choose Joe?

Foreclosures on American homes are running about 20,000 per week, according to the New York Times editorial board this morning. Here on my street, a bank auction sign has now replaced the For Sale sign in front of a neighbor’s home. It’s an old place, very small, probably built in the early 60s. The lot is large and pretty, lots of trees.

Sad.

31/50 - Global warming

Fingers ache. Knees ache. Stomach feels a bit off.

It’s the weather, or so they say. One day rain. Then the next, the sun blares alone in a blank sky dry of clouds and it seems like everything else, too. The bewildered birds stay put in the trees. There’s shade in ‘em.

A body can’t hardly get used to changes that fast. The sun is out now, roasting the pavements and wilting dandelions, but in my fingers it’s still drizzling, and in my knee, it’s raining like hell.

My stomach? I think we can put that down to global warming.

30/50 - Hurling

It was our sixth call that night. The dispatcher told us where to find our man, and I remember saying to Drew, who was driving the ambulance, that he was probably another drunk. We get a lot of them here.

When we found the dark lump in the middle of the hurling pitch, my guess seemed even more sure. Bloke had probably drunk too much black and wobbled off for home, got lost on the pitch and decided to have a little nap. He wouldn’t be the first.

Pity it never occurred to me that it could be an ambush.

Update: Find more of this story here.