08 May, 2005
motherless children have a harder time

phase one in KissUpitude, complete.

making the gravel-crunching roll up the driveway to "home", dodging the truck of the sheepherder and the guinea hens darting across the lane, evokes concerns some term "complex".

i walked up this same road, in the dark, when my grandmother lived by herself up there. it used to scare the shit out of me: dark, dense, foreboding woods stretching aross the mountain... not so silent, ever sentient, impenetrable. watching.

the turn-around spot, before the entrance to the mountain trail... where my brother shot me in the back with a BB gun when i was leaving for a job interview. we'd had one of our monumental fistfights, me the nominal victor... he responded by running into the house for the gun, jerked the passenger door open, and kerblammo! sort of. i was still bleeding when i was filling out the application.

the lawn... junglelike. grass a foot tall. obviously, Moms had been letting it go. i know every square inch of this plot du l'herbe, depending upon what trees/shrubs had been allowed to propagate... grandma, respectful of life regardless of how much of the landscape covered the house, agonized over every branch pruning. this regard did not carry over to the snake population.

when she opened the door after i knocked, looking disheveled and worse for wear-and-tear, she was surprised... and said that she'd decided that i planned to never return. typical. too stubborn to use the phone to communicate (unless it's time for a drama scene), or to visit (since she disliked Yoko from Day One)... "stubbornness": number one family trait. number two family trait: manic-depressiveness. those two states hang over the trees like a low cloud.

despite the apprehension, i was glad to see her. i hate this drama club shit... and there are no guarantees that we live as long as we want, to have things our own way. i just wish that this, too, was a shared psychological component. but, my open mind, attention to detail, and asethetics found their seeds here... and this has not been forgotten.

but, anyway... all is forgiven. especially when my "gift" for Mother'sDay was cutting the lawn... all five acres of it. just like i used to for years, when Grannie was here. it all revolves in a circle, dunnit?

later, back at home, i wallowed in racing and Fuller'sLondon'sPride... and took a stab at learning basic Japanese:
kon' ichi wa. watashi wa Ska "T" desu. Section 9. hajimemashite. doozo yoroshiku.
not that this will help me with anime soundtracks, necessarily.

Yoko returns today... hours before i leave, again.

with gravel crunching behind me.

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