last night my family rushed out to the front yard to see a space shuttle. i was confident as i walked through the blackness blindly, barefoot, trusting the brick walkway that's been my friend for so many years that by now it knows not to let any slugs slide under my feet. it's not a good idea to tell someone that i probably won't ever wear the shirt she bought me for christmas, but it's okay if it's my mother because she understands. she wants me to tell her. it's not a good idea to go shoeless down a walkway on a pitch-black summer night, but it's okay if it's my very own walkway, because my walkway understands. it wants my feet to fall upon it heavily and without hesitation. sometimes you can do dangerous things around people and walkways you trust. or maybe this is just foolishness by dint of familiarity, but it seems to work out pretty well.
anyway, we never saw the space shuttle. there were trees and clouds in the way. but we never saw any slugs either, and for that i am glad.
p.s. these days i am 98% certain that my mother would never buy me a shirt i didn't like.
5 comments:
I love this story, and I love you, and I hate slugs. (I have a very unpleasant memory of when the children were very young and there weren't so many of them, perhaps only two, and I was still naive; I wandered barefoot into the backyard with my two lovelies playing about my feet while I was hanging clothes on the line to dry (this WAS a very long time ago); suddenly the day's brightness was shattered with the squishy, sticky feeling of mashed slug on my left foot, between the toes, no less. It took days to finally be free of the goop that plastered my foot. I have been horrified of them ever since...)
Oh Annie, you make me so happy.
I love it when you blog.
Sue: When my two oldest were littles I walked barefoot one dark evening to the neighbors, when something horrifyingly large squished between my big toe and its neighbor. I screamed so loud and was so frightened that Thom bolted out our front door ready to rescue me from the apparent attempted murder which he believed to be taking place.
(on another occassion a few years earlier on the other side of America, he did the same thing when I walked into a giant spider's web that was built in front of my nieghbor's front door.)
nEIghbor's
Annie. So freaking weird. You have popped up TWICE unexpectedly in my life the past two days. Yesterday, my brother got a package from one of the Howards (I think) and the label was thin and the package label underneath was YOUR name. It was old asthmatic kitty wrapping.
Then today, I was blogging about Amelia Earhart, and I did a google image search. I loved the second image that popped up, clicked it, and it took me to YOUR blog, where you had written about her a whiles back. Go try it.
You're haunting me!!!! It's nice though :) Can't wait to have the actual 3C haunting in a few weeks!
mrs kate!! stepped on a slug the other day and screamed SO loud into the phone and into eric's ear that he thought something entirely more horrific had happened.
i tried convincing him it's terrifying to step on a slug. he didn't think so.
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