redhead bouquet

good news: this necessitated me (1) using an old rope (that my mom's been practicing sailors' knots with) to idiosyncratically tie the tomato stakes to the porch railing, (2) bringing the hose around to water everything so they'll all be less top-heavy, (3) going down to the lake to find some big stones to add to the picnic table cover because it keeps blowing off because its two erstwhile biggest stones are now in the tomato plant pots, (4) blasting the new stones with the hose to get bugs and dirt off of them and also blasting the picnic table cover with the hose to get diet coke off of it because my diet coke blew over, all-in-all incrediblyyyy satisfying my spiritual need to bustle around as one belonging-part of home-and-adjacent-nature.

woke up today brimming with existential dread and then tonight ate a grilled brat and some watermelon and two forms of potato (roasted and salad) on the deck and toasted two jumbo marshmallows and made one of them into a s'more and rode in the car for half an hour to a marsh i thought was much further away and saw a great blue heron standing in a birch tree and two trumpeter swans with four cygnets swimming in a pink sunset reflection and one duck with three fuzzy babies and heard many many bullfrogs that kept surprising me and making me giggle and heard some sandhill cranes make their big weird noise and walked back to the car in the mostly-dark towards one stripe of peach sky and venus with fireflies blinking all around in the grasses and another great blue heron or maybe the same one flew low right over us. then we stopped on the side of the road at an overlook where the ground drops out from beneath you and you're at the top of tall trees and you can hear the water hundreds of feet below and it gave me a little vertigo and made me a little nauseous but also felt like it would stick in a way that lots of things here don't right now; they mostly seem like they happen and then they kind of wash away and i won't be able to reach back for the feeling or the sight later. across the road from the overlook and the lake there were more fireflies and higher, glittering everywhere in the trees'-silhouette rather than sticking close to the ground, and i think that might stick too.

today my grandparents' 25-year-old pontoon boat stalled on the other side of the lake and would only start up in order to immediately sputter out. the anchor my mom tied on so we could have a little picnic while giving the motor a break before trying again came loose and was lost to the lake. i had to do a quick-change under a towel and jump in with a tow-rope around my waist to be a human anchor to stop us from very nearly drifting into strangers' docks and boats on hoists. our next-door neighbor and her daughter came to rescue us and tow us home but then their boat kept stalling when they tried to idle for a minute while i got back on the pontoon boat so i was like 'just leave me here! it's fine! come back to get me on [road that goes along the entirety of that side of the lake] in the car!' so they did, and luna climbed the back of the boat like a mountain goat and looked at me with alarm as they sped away leaving me in the lake. i eventually returned to land and walked down a dirt road through the woods with five thousand ruthless mosquitoes to get to that road and then i stood on the side of that road in my swimsuit and my grandma's crocs for an indeterminable amount of time in the beating sun, but at least the bugs weren't there. maybe it was 35 minutes. maybe it was 55. i genuinely have no idea. there was a nice woman floating in a tube by the dock we almost ran into and we bobbed in the lake together for awhile and watched the two boats get further away and chatted about loons and eagles and family history, and she let me use her phone to give my mom slightly more information about where to find me, and tomorrow we're going to bring her a thank-you cherry pie. when the next-door neighbor and her daughter got the boat towed home the other next-door neighbor and her daughter came over to help untie it and get it situated, because my mom still can't go in the water with her knee surgery incision. when i told my sister about our adventures she was like 'i'm speechless. but also, girl power.' and like, yeah. pretty much.