Musings from the Café at the End of the Universe

Thursday - One week till Moving Out This morning my eyes opened at 0630, according to plan.yesterday I slept till 0900 as my body recovered from the abuse I dealt it as part of this moving process. Both V and I are paying the physical price for maintaining our focus on leaving the Westwood Hills subdivision. The place feels “safe” and has the convenience of good roads, neighbours who do a fair job of hiding their discomfort with having a gay couple in their neighbourhood, and the lovely enfolding fog from time to time. But there’s no doubt that it was our dissatisfaction with the neighbourhood that impelled up to put this house up for sale. We were no alone in our feelings, since around the time we listed our house, several others in the subdivision went up for sale. We don’t have facts about their reasons for leaving. Some may have been frightened of smoke from an industrial asphalt plant that is planned for construction far enough away to present a sensible threat. M...

  Weeds This morning Virgi and I had a chat about the state of the world and odd things that happen, and what we’ve witnessed. One of the things we started to talk about was remembering how much we enjoyed going out into  nature to our meadow in late October and early November to find dried milkweed pods. On the day my father died in 2000, we went for a walk beside a canal in Peterborough in a wild place and I noticed some dried milkweed pods still on the bare stems of their mother plant. It was November 1, 2000 and I needed some time to decompress and begin to put things in my mind to rest and allow the grieving process to begin. I snapped a dried milkweed stem and tore off 3 pods, handing one to Virgi. She took it and was looking at it quizzically as I broke open one of mine and held it up in front of my face. I blew sharply into the pod and a cloud of parachute lofted seeds leapt from the pod into the air, draftily lazily towards the field beside us. Her eyes were que...