Saturday, September 03, 2005, 06:52
"Say good night, John Boy"
My husband thinks I talk too much. I don't know why. *Just* because I was on the telephone for two hours with my sister Friday night. I mean -- really. I was talking to my SISTER, for crying out loud.
I knew it was time to get off the phone, though, when Randy came out into the kitchen wearing his pajamas.
"Say good night, John Boy," he said.
"Just a minute," I said to Loretta. "Randy is trying to tell me something."
"What?" I said.
"Say good night, John Boy," Randy said.
"Say good nigh, John Boy?" I said.
"Yes, say good night, John Boy," he said.
"I think Randy's trying to tell me I should get off the phone," I said to Loretta. "Although, I guess we have been talking for two hours."
"Two hours? Really? Yes, I suppose we probably should hang up," Loretta said.
"So," Randy said when I had hung up the phone, "what did you talk about?"
"Well, I don't know. Nothing really. Just stuff," I said.
"Nothing?" Randy said. "You were on the phone for two hours!"
"Hmmmm, let's see. Well, we talked about David's wedding (my nephew, her son, is getting married next weekend), and, ummmm, the rehearsal dinner, and I told her about Isabelle, and -- you know -- just stuff," I said.
After all, it's not like I talk to Loretta long-distance every day. Or even every week. In fact, we might chat like that once a month. I'd LIKE to talk to her every day, but we would never be able to afford the phone bill.
Actually, talking on the phone with my sister for two hours is an occupational hazard. I'm a writer. Writers sit by themselves and write. For hours and days at a time. And sometimes I need to talk to my sister.
LeAnn R. Ralph
Thursday, September 01, 2005, 18:15
Hang Onto Your Hat. . .
Today is one of those days that if you are wearing a hat and you are planning on going outside, you'd better be prepared to make a wild grab for the hat when you step out the door. It hasn't been this windy in quite a while -- gusts of up to 40 miles per hour -- windy enough to make the windchimes jangle wildly, to make the hammock swing back and forth and twist in the wind, to make the trees at the edge of yard bend sideways.
Brushing Isabelle this morning was quite a task. Brushing my gelding, Kajun, wasn't so bad because he was standing in the barn, but Isabelle is out in the pasture, and we were right out in the force of the wind.
For some reason, over the past couple of days, Isabelle has started to shed. She is supposed to be a black horse, but on her back, she's got lots of brown hair (baby hair?) that has started to let loose. When I rub her back with the rubber curry, the hair rolls off in clumps. And that's why it was so difficult to brush her this morning -- as soon as I started with the rubber curry, I was in the middle of a "hair storm" -- horse hair flying all over the place. Of course, Isabelle didn't mind, she was getting her back rubbed and that's all she cared about.
When I had finished brushing her, the wind died down for a minute, which I couldn't hardly believe, but it did, so I seized the opportunity to spray some fly spray on Isabelle.
What was I thinking? Why did I even worry about fly spray? Yes, the flies are bad at this time of year, but it's going to have to be a very big fly with exceptionally strong wings to make any headway in this kind of wind. Even if the flies try to land on the horse, they'll be blown twenty feet away before they've had a chance to settle on her.
A forty-mile-an-hour-wind is nothing, however, compared to the wind experienced earlier this week by the people in Louisiana and Mississippi from hurricane Katrina.
The scenes of devastation from the Gulf states are almost unbelievable to me. I visited New Orleans a long time ago ( more than 20 years ago now, I guess) and I am having trouble reconciling myself to the fact that the city of New Orleans is under water and that entire communities along the coast have been reduced to piles of rubble.
If I am having trouble grasping the enormity of the situation -- I can only begin to imagine what it must be like for the people who live there.
We talk about all the things that human beings are doing to destroy the earth: global warming and polluting the environment and changing the environment (by building subdivisions for instance, which causes more runoff during rain storms because the concrete and blacktop do not allow the water to soak in). But as Randy pointed out while we were watching news coverage of Louisiana and Mississippi on Wednesday night -- "maybe the earth is trying to destroy us."
LeAnn R. Ralph