[what I was working on off and on today. Yes, it's fiction.]
I was eleven the winter that Glory Hodgett fell through the ice.
It was one of the cold, snowy winters we get up here in the mountains where everyone gets pretty much snowed in for months at a time. Glory and I lived a couple of miles apart; my mom and I lived closer to the road than the Hodgetts, and Glory and her mom Emmy would come tramping through the snow at least twice or three times a week to hear the latest news and pick up whatever supplies had been left.
Glory's mom Emmy was a hippie, my mom said. I thought she was the most beautiful creature on earth. even in the winter when everyone's noses were cracked and bleeding and faces were red with the constant chill, Emmy Hodgett's face had a translucent quality to it. She wore tunics and skirts and jewelry carved from wood. She could shoot a crow dead at 150 feet, and her house backed up to thousands of acres of Calaveras wilderness. She and Glory lived alone, and Glory came over to my house to be tutored by my mother when the weather was good enough.
Glory was a wild kid, just a whirlwind of energy, always into everything. she was tiny and she had a shock of bright red hair. Grownups looked at her indulgently and let her get away with murder. I despised her because I already looked a little bit sly with my dark hair and rangy bones, and she got a lot more attention than I ever did.
But at the same time I adored her. She got to call her mom Emmy and she had two Malamute dogs who were her closest friends in the world. She told me, matter of factly, "I'm the pack leader. I'm their alpha. Being part of a pack is much better than having a human family." She also had a Maine Coon cat who would come curl up om my legs when I stayed the night. Glory smelled like pine tar and red dust, and she would have been a complete disaster in what my mom called the civilized portions of the country, by which she meant anything more than three ridges to the west, the part of the mountains that were cleared of snow regularly.
So in the summer, I'd look out the back window and see this tiny figure running up the pine path towards the house, followed by two huge loping dogs that looked like they had a lot of wolf in their ancestry. She was barefoot most of the time, and topless when she wasn't within sight of my mom. In winter, she'd move more slowly because she had more clothes on, but it was the same picture.
Glory Hodgett didn't believe in Christmas or Easter, but she liked Halloween, even though neither of us had ever been trick-or-treating. We'd sit on rocks and tell each other stories about going out dressed our scary bests. Glory was going to be a witch from Mars. "Because all the witches on mars have red hair. i'm a natural. The dogs can be my escorts." I tried for years to think of a costume that would be better than a witch from Mars, but I couldn't. I also couldn't admit that what I really wanted to be was a princess, with a glamorous long blue satin dress and a tiara. I'd seen one in the JC Penny catalog one year and I wanted a tiara desperately. But there was no admitting this to Glory Hodgett, who scorned material goods and especially material goods that perpetuated the evils of society. I never listened to her very much when she told me about the evils of society. Glory's mom had come to live out here because of the evils of society, she said.
I couldn't see what was so evil about society. There were McDonald's restaurants in society, and anywhere that served Big Macs was nowhere near evil in my opinion. I never told Glory that, though. Glory'd been out in the evil world, and they'd made her leash her dogs ("The pack," she said, "needs to be trusted entirely. what would you think if your mom had to tie you up whenever you went into town with her?") and hush her voice. When she went into town with my mom and I, she was never entirely comfortable, even though everyone was really nice to her because she was so little and cute. she distrusted everyone, pretty much.
Glory was pretty much my only playmate, the only kid my age for ten miles. The Bronder boys out by Renauld were eleven and fourteen, but they had a reputation for being wild so I wasn't allowed to play with them. I don't think my mom would have let me play with Glory, either, except that she thought that maybe the two of us would be good influences on each other.
So that winter that Glory fell through was the year that six feet of snow fell in a day. My mom had a weather station set up in the backyard, and she went out to check it more than usual that night. I remember her frowning. "Looks like we're in for it, for sure. How much firewood do we have in the shed?" I'd stacked a bunch the day before, so i knew we had a full shed, and i told her so.
"Good. We should be set."
The next morning, I put on show shoes and started out to the Hodgetts' to see if they were okay and ask if they needed anything.
[that's all the father I've gotten. I need to work on this some more.]
Tonight, I Accomplished Things.
I put together the shelves for the kitchen, moved everything off the shelves in there already, moved those shelves out to the living room, moved the table over to the other wall, moved the microwave cart over, and moved the new shelves where the table had been. Then I put stuff back on the shelves and swept out that part of the kitchen. It looks a lot better, now.
Then I went and transferred a bunch of my clothes from the shelves in my wardrobe into the dresser. Which was fun, and I managed to cull a bunch of clothes that I've not worn in the past year and have absolutely no intention of ever wearing again.
Unfortunately, I didn't make much progress on actually making the place look any cleaner. My room looks better, though, since I did laundry, and the hyperactive neat freak in me has been partially appeased. There's still the sink full of dirty dishes...but that's a job for tomorrow night. As well as the floors, and the rug, and the sheets...we'll see how much of this I get done.
Check out that funky hairline. Wild. I never noticed that my hair does that before.
Oh, and tonight I found that I now fit comfortably into a pair of button-fly pants that a friend gave me a few years ago...so i have more jeans! which, believe me, is a wonderful thing.
So. Household stuff. I want to sleep but I need to wait for my laundry to finish.
Soon.
and tomorrow, Loba will be here, and much cuddling and talking and hot passionate things will happen. Mmm.
Can you tell I'm tired?
Best reason to go to stuff at The Wet Spot:
Because finding a good sex-positive meeting/play space is really, really rare. and it's near me!
how goes the war?
Washing day for the troops.
