I returned home to a scorcher. Once upon a time I lived in Chico, California which is about 125 degrees from March through November so I should be an old hand at cooling myself off with beer and baggies full of ice, but somehow I can’t get the hang of it. My beverages keep warming themselves before I can finish them and my fan is being an utter butthead, making a huge racket as it moves around stuffy air. I can’t put it in the window because it is much hotter outside so it keeps tipping over and frightening Stringer Bell who jumps up each time going AROOOOO ROOOO ROOOO, AROOOO ROOO ROOOO even though it is always the damn fan and never a salivating dog eating monster. Also my ears are sweating.

So far there have been few casualties in the garden because I’ve been getting up when it’s only 80 and watering the shit out of everything. Usually I repeat the process right before dark when it’s 92. Green tomatoes have turned red over night and the pumpkin suddenly looks like a big round Charlie Brown head. The first day I was back I thought it would be a smashing idea to plant cabbage and broccoli for a winter garden at the Marvelous Plot of Awesomeness and the jury is still out on that. At this point, they live but I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep up this ultra responsible watering schedule.

to Brooklyn, and Guilford, and New Haven, and back to Brooklyn because my Brother-in-law was getting married and it seemed a good time to pack way too many locales into a one week trip. I formed the following opinions:

• I love wrought iron.
• I love wrought iron so much that I’m thinking of installing decorative security bars on all my windows and/or becoming a welder.
• Brooklyn drivers are crazy.
• If I lived in Brooklyn I would probably get run over immediately and/or become a shut in (in a crazy beautiful 4th floor walk-up).
• People in Guilford do not plant gardens in their front yards.
• Every town should have a large square of grass in the middle with churches from the 1700’s lining it.
• New Haven can be very rainy but has incredible pizza.
• Bagpipe Man was a naughty adolescent who hung out on heat vents and had sex in cemeteries.
• Budget Rental Car is a shady operation with usurious business practices.
• Humidity is glorious and renders chapstick completely unnecessary.
• “Curb” can be used as a verb to mean “make your dog poop in the gutter".

• Brownstones make me want to live right on top of my neighbors with no room to garden because they have 12 foot tin ceilings, and itty bitty galley kitchens that no one ever cooks in, because everyone gets takeout as naturally they are too busy leading fabulous creative lives to toil at homemaking.

• Portland can look pretty damn sweet after an hour on the tarmac, six in the air, forty-five minutes corralling luggage and a cab, and a three hour time change making it ostensibly 3:00 in the morning.
• It’s fabulous to be back.

The white Pinkerton had been missing for days. We had all but given up seeing her again in a healthy state. I was pretty sure she had crawled back into the ivy and succumbed to some nondescript chicken ailment so I asked Snowpea to hack away at the brambles so we could recover the sad remains.

Snowpea cleared the land and by the by uncovered a completely not dead and very grumpy chicken. She is out there right now incubating a clutch of infertile eggs. She’s not going anywhere. This is the one Pinkerton I’ve never held because I can’t catch her and she fears my touch. Now I (and other less loving predators) can walk right up to her because she’s no longer sequestered in a hideyhole and plans to sit those eggs come hell or high water. It’s rather heartbreaking if you’re one to anthropomorphize poultry. I made her a bit of shelter out of plywood and brought food and water over but she didn’t thank me. I’m thinking about buying her some hatching eggs but I need to go to New York for a wedding and I don’t really need any more chickens. Still…She’s doing such a good job with those duds, it seems a shame to waste all that mothering instinct.

These detailed instructions appeared on the boys’ door after I made a part time job of hassling them about keeping all their crap on the floor. I may have threatened to “GO IN THERE WITH A GARBAGE BAG” which is pretty rich coming from a person with a dirty laundry “pile” taking up half their room and a large nest of old tissues and chapstick stuffed between the bed and the wall dating back to cold and flu season, but I digress. These boys have been walking all over their books and storing dessicated apple cores under their dresser. They have been causing me to do whole loads of laundry which later turn out to have been already clean as well as losing shoes, library cards, and swimming trunks, to some vortex of a closet that no one’s seen the back of since 2005. In short they are a menace. Luckily these new rules K thought up have really done the trick. Snort.

My new plan is to hide amongst the rubble (believe me, it’s possible) and scare the bejeezus out of them when I emerge draped in a hodgepodge of action figures, pillow cases, dried up playdough, and socks because if you can’t see your mom lurking in the detritus, your room is too messy.