❧
More of the junk other people dumped on me got burned this morning. Other stuff will follow. I seem to be imposing my rights as a minimalist to the supposed good will of others. I have a dirty old box of cheap pottery that was given to my mother as a sales prize for selling Compton's Encyclopedias. My siblings urged it upon me when we were cleaning out my mother's house when she died. "Just get it out of here for right now. We have so much stuff to get rid off."
To my knowledge we haven't had a truthful, intimate conversation about what we did with my mother's collection of hokum. Her youngest sister's house was filled to the brim with cheap trinkets the last time we visited. I think she might have bought the original ones as mementos from she and her husband's travels on his motorcycle, and then her family started bringing the other stuff because they thought she might like it. Every open space in at least three rooms was covered with this affectionate junk.
It's not clear to me whether I'm not naturally a collector type person or whether I've decided that waxing nostalgic for the stuff of days gone by is a waste of time. It's a little of both maybe. Back when I was literally a bum on the road I had to tote whatever stuff I carried with me in my hands or on my back. Heavy stuff of whatever value didn't last long.
Except for the last twenty or thirty years I have lived by myself in this rat hole I built as a place to sleep and put my legal papers like tax returns and my Navy discharge documents, I have moved around too often to build up a bunch of extraneous household items. You know how it is. Every time a body moves to a new place they throw away what they can as excess baggage. I may have gone to extremes occasionally.
The weather seems to indicate a drought soon locally. That's not unusual for around here. The yearly amounts of rain can run up to 50-60 inches. But, we get a lot of our rain from tropical storms that form down in either the Bermuda Triangle or the Gulf of Mexico. Granted, the seasonal rains we get from the cool fronts dropping down out of Canada or parts north do happen at a fairly regular pace, but if no tropical storms pass through here a drought condition may arise.
That's gonna be a problem sooner than later for the larger cities up in the piedmont region of the state. The Research Triangle located around the state capitol is producing lot of high-paying technical jobs, and with the jobs come real estate development, and a drain on what fresh water is available from the lakes and rivers in the piedmont.
A drought just emphasizes the present limitations, and brings the focus on what can happen in the future. Nothing. They're already topped out. They go a few years without a drought and the residents with new houses think they got it made with irrigated lawns and flower gardens galore, and then it doesn't rain... and it doesn't rain... and what seemed like a rain forest turns California brown.
❦
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
