More Excuses...or Reasons

However you might want to view them.

I cannot get to my website yet to update it, and even if I could, I wouldn't have anything to update it with, and so the Calendar may not get changed from July until September. I am searching for a day when I can methodically work through the bugs on my machine and get everything squared away again. It's something I might have to do in the dead of night, because interruptions create havoc with my train of thought, especially when I'm out of my element. I'm used to software loading and doing what it's supposed to do.

All of this is making me want a new laptop--bigger, badder, better. But with fuel prices the way we are, guess what. I'll have to settle for dreaming big, I guess.

Maybe I should just dream cold. Like this:

I need this shot for wallpaper in my house and maybe if we all could at least think cool we'd feel better. But the house barely cools off at night anymore, and it's going to take as many, if not more, consecutive days of cool to get things back to normal. Then there's the rain issue. We won't go there.

Think cool, think peace, think better future. All will happen, sooner or later.

Fast Fiction:

Mama Sally brought me a tall glass of gin with a lime. I hate gin and I doubted I liked limes but she was trying her best to be hospitable with what she had to work with. I'm sure there was water. I would have gulped that. Now there was nothing more to do but wait for a moment to request a glass. So I watched the lime bob, and the sweat trickle down the sides of the glass. I was too hot to move, too tired to search for conversation topics and I was thirsty beyond belief. Maybe that would make gin taste good? I tried it.

No.

Ah, I'd never tried a lime. Maybe it was better than gin.

"Are you staying the night, Molly?" she asked as I was in mid-pucker. No, the lime wasn't what I needed either.

"I hadn't thought about it. I can move on, if it's a bother." I tried scooping up the condensation with my forefinger and sucking it off the tip.

"No bother. Gracey can make up the bed in a wink. I just need to tell her." She rang a bell at her side, and I closed my eyes to count the second that passed before Gracey appeared at her elbow. Twenty-two.

"Gracy, Miss Molly will need Antonia's room for the night, please."

"Certainly. And for dinner?"

"Just a cold plate, I'm sure. It's too hot for much else. Am I right Molly?"

"You are right. With plenty of water on hand, please," I added, not caring who thought I was strange. "I can't seem to get enough." I explained to the silence that settled around us as if demanding an explanation.

"Anything else?" Gracey inquired.

"That will be all, Gracy. Thank you. It could be your health, you know," Mama Sally said to me after Gracey had left and the buzz of the cicadas became too monotonous to bear.

"I don't understand."

"The thirst. Beauford had the most audacious thirst. Doc Trip thought it had something to do with blood sugar and such. Altogether it killed him, I believe."

I wasn't sure audacious was a word, or if it was a word, if it meant what she thought it should.

"Thank you. I should check that out. But don't forget it has been over 100 for the past ten days. I think that takes it's toll. Isn't it natural to drink water to replenish what we need?"

"Darling, there is water in food. In watermelon. If God meant for us to drink water, he wouldn't have allowed us to learn to make spirits. I am convinced. However, I supposed if one developed the taste for water, it would be easier and cheaper, which I'm sure it something that you have to consider, with your family situation."

I tried not to sigh too loud. She never had approved of my salesman father, and was convinced my mother and I lived in abject poverty as a result of her marrying beneath her station.

"I just haven't developed a taste for spirits," I said firmly. "I have developed a taste for the Carolinas and the mountains, however." I switched the topics as smoothly as I felt I could.

"And what does that mean? What do you need, Molly?"

"Oh, I don't need anything at all. I just wanted to let you know that in the fall I'll be living in Raleigh."

"Wonderful," she said, clapping her hands like a child. "You'll be in my backyard. You're welcome whenever Antonia's not home for a visit. It's a little much for me to handle more than one visitor at a time," she hastened to add.

Always the polite and correct hostess, she didn't even want the hint of an implication that she understood Antonia was fingernails and I was the chalkboard she liked to rake them across. We were a horrible combination.

"Thank you."

"Why don't you go on up to the room and rest under the fan until dinner, Dear."

"A good idea. Formal tonight?" I knew her penchant for dressing for dinner.

"For a cold plate? You're kidding me, you silly girl. Anything but a bathing suit will do just fine." She giggled before she uncurled from her Adirondack chair. I followed her lead.

Anticipation skittered through my veins, as I neared the bedroom I would be using for the night. Of the six bedrooms on the first floor alone, why she always put me in the room Antonia used when she was here was beyond me. But I was always glad because I was quite entertained snooping through my cousins things and putting them back exactly as they were so that she never ever knew I was there....