--I WILL BRING YOU STARLIGHT BY THE BARROW

…I feel a little blue today, a little sad.  Already this morning I do.  That’s not a good sign.  But it’s not anything major, nothing I can’t overcome.  I’m just not sure why I feel this way.  It may have to do with a friend’s blog post I just read.  She has Lyme Disease and has been struggling with it for three years.  So maybe that’s why I’m a bit blue.

…If you could change things in your life, in your past, would you?  Or are you a person who has no regrets?

…It’s not that early but it feels like I’m the only one alive on the lake this morning.

…I wrote this yesterday, intentionally trying to keep it at 200 words or less:

                                                                   Escape

                My brothers shared a girl the summer I turned nine. 

She worked the fields like we did, all of us on our knees in between rows picking berries for school clothes money.  Mother was sick and homebound, so my oldest brother drove.

                At the end of each day, my brother stopped off at the trailer park where the girl lived.  He’d tell me to wait in the car and then he and the girl and my other brother would go inside the girl’s trailer.

When they came out they were usually breathless and sweaty and disheveled.   Inside the car they’d trade high fives and say, “Oh, man!”

                One day the girl wasn’t at the fields.  Afterward my brothers drove to her trailer park and knocked on her door.  A brittle old man answered.  He said he didn’t know any girl, said he’d been living in the trailer by himself for over a decade.

                I figured the girl must have paid the old man to say that.  I figured she was tired of my brothers’ misery just as I was, only she’d found an escape.

                When I tell my wife the story now, she laughs and says, “You and your imagination.”