This Week's Blog Farts

I'm not sure if it's possible to have blog farts when one hasn't blogged all week, but these are half developed ideas that could have made their own blog if I'd had the energy to do so. I guess that qualifies them.

1. It is snowing outside, a wet thin snow that isn't sticking to the pavement but that is bending the faces of the pansies toward the ground and highlighting roofs.

When I complained about the snow to my good neighbor Larry he replied that we needed the moisture and he wished it would snow day and night. I wanted to reply crisply was he aware that there were other forms of precipitation than snow and far more appropriate to the season?

I did not. It is a native's form of pride out here to gloat in spring snow. The natives here have been so buried under an avalanche of new comers that I cannot begrudge them their cherished distinctions.

Not that it doesn't snow some in April back in Yank town, my native habitat. It does and it will. But everyone is properly horrified because lord knows, we've gotten more than enough moisture in its various and proper forms, such as rain, hail, ice storms and nor'easters.

2. I was driving to work yesterday when the song "Smooth" came on, by Santana and Rob Thomas. It was released back in the summer of 1999; I was twenty one years old. Listening to the song, I remembered the kind of animal like satisfaction that is intrinsic to youth itself, that has no other justification.

It makes me think of a young lion stretching lazily in the sun; it makes me think of my younger brother, his dirty blond hair curling into his eyes, lying with his legs stretched out on the carpet, smoking a cheap cigar and expounding lazily on the best way to survive a zombie attack.

3. I have lately come through rather embarrassing regression to an early deployment mindset. I have been beleaguered by loneliness, restlessness and a sharp, aching need for the physical presence of my husband much more acute than the usual, manageable dull throb.

He's gone somewhere else and as a result, I hear from him very rarely, either by phone or by Internet. All the strength I had ascribed to myself lay more accurately in the circumstances of communication that we had enjoyed ever since he returned from R&R, back in late December.

I have moped about the house, gone for long walks, devoured novels, watched documentaries; in short, done whatever I could to distract myself until I could adjust. I felt as though I were sinking deeper into the deployment; as though the deployment were some form of slow moving morass that was sucking me in further and further into the quiet.

I got so impatient with myself. Why couldn't I be grateful? If November-Me or Early-January-Me was here, I have a feeling I might be b-tch slapping myself. How dare I complain, when my husband's return is less than four months away? Less than four months!! Who cares what the circumstances are right now, all I have to do is endure and I'll have him beside me.

But it didn't matter how much I lectured myself, I was sunk and until I adjusted, I remained in that depressing place. Now I begin to get the hang of things again and to feel more stable and next week the temperature will reach the seventies, with sun falling down hot and strong on the sidewalks and in two weeks the leaves will begin to show themselves on the birch tree. Right now it's covered in tiny, silver mittens. I had no idea birch trees did that.

4. I have read the English novels that helped me through this stage at least two or three times, some of them five or six. It wasn't until this time around that I noticed no one ever goes to the bathroom.

I noticed this because the main characters are constantly drinking. Here's an average day in the life of an English novel heroine: she wakes and drinks coffee or tea. She either goes out visits or receives visitors and drinks either a second cup of coffee or tea. She has lunch with tea, or she has high tea with (obviously) tea.

Then she has pre dinner drinks, usually sherry. With dinner she will have wine. After dinner she will either have coffee or scotch with soda. (Any Americans present with have Scotch on the rocks; such is the distinction.) If she cannot sleep, she will get up and make herself-you guessed it-more tea or perhaps warm milk.

At no point in this day does she ever raise her hand, timidly or desperately, to declare that she simply must use the loo. On her walk into the village for some lamb or mackerel she does not feel the need to rush off into the hedgerows. On her ride through the countryside with her romantic interest, when they stop for high tea at a little tea house, she does not excuse herself to the power room.

I understand using the bathroom is not romantic and may ruin the mood set by the nodding daffodils, the Limoges china and the windy coast of Cornwall. I write myself, I know how this goes. But I couldn't help but feel so sorry for the poor heroine. Those are not just any drinks; those are the drinks that will send any hapless human ricocheting back and forth from the WC for several hours straight after partaking. I mean, tea! Alcohol and coffee! One after another after another.

I could only figure that the English must have, after generations upon generations of drinking in this way, have developed bladders the size of which no other race can compare to.