Shell

I don't really know where I'm going with this, by the way. And most people think I'm crazy, but aren't we all?

I went out looking for the aurora borealis last night here in southeastern Minnesota. I really do live here-- have for the past 5 years-- but only for another 2 weeks, then we're moving to Raleigh, NC.

No aurora.

Onto it, then.


Within the month after Lil left, I got rid of the house. "Got rid of." Like I was some half-witted hermit crab just sloughing off the stuffy old, boring shell on my back, scuttling naked across the beach looking for another, more hip, shell.

[it could take me as long to get a character someplace as it took Thomas Wolfe to get his characters somewhere...jesus c.]

I packed some of my belongings everyday. Broke down a room and stacked the boxes, til the place smelled of stale corrugated cardboard and packing tape and the rooms began to echo the way they do suddenly when a picture is taken down and the books are stripped from their shelves.

I have a friend who prefers her shelves empty.

"Why have shelves?" I asked her.
We were half-way through a bottle of inexpensive shiraz and a couple cartons of chinese, on the floor in my old shell.

"They're beautiful shelves," she responded.

I wanted to see Aunt Evelyn again.
I know I keep bringing the "dime-thing" up, but since I had relied on their appearances-- on the sidewalk, in the files at work, dropping out of the sky behind my back-- I was--kaPOW!-- without a compass, a timepiece, and I hit the throttle. She was gonna die before I could drive to Connecticut. So I said a rosary. My mother always seemed to do that when something was foreboding.
"Say a rosary," she would whisper.
"Say a novena." I don't even remember what a 'novena' is.
"When was the last time you went to confession?" she had asked me when I was home--CT--a year ago.
"Uh, 20 years ago," I said.
Dizziness, procrastination. "Lead me not into t....."
"Mother, I will never go to confession again."
"Never say 'never,' she said. I detested that phrase.
"Isn't that the better part of a title for a James Bond flick?"

And I shrugged it off with a glib movie remark.

My mothers' rosary beads are